If we all could vote...

[Crissa]

I have to say, if you don't eat fresh fruit and vegetables, why do you think you're informed enough to complain about their prices?

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

PS, what's the price of, say, fresh tomatoes today in your market? Bananas? Find out, we'll compare.

Well, the local farmers markets are all at times when I have to work, so I end up shopping at regular old bunny-killing grocery stores, but here're this weekend's fruit and veggie prices:


Bananas: 59 cents / lb

Tomatos: 99 cents / lb (or 1.29 lb for older tomatos in the more upscale grocery store)

Corn: 5 ears for $2, and quality is now lousy. Earlier in summer, the price is half or less.

Golden Delicious Apples: $1.49/lb loose or $4 for a 3 lb bag

[PhoneLobster]

Frankly this food conversation bores me.

Food is in fact far too cheap. There is a big and unfair markup, on the part of big chains and retailers mostly and farmers don't get it. But farmers need to charge more (they can't but they need to) to pay for best practice which for the most part they don't use.

Local food is an issue, especially under the whole peak oil situation. But seriously you need to be growing food locally as in your own damn backyard locally.

The interesting tangent on this discussion I recall recently reading was a discussion on the continued viability of suburbia considering increased travel expenses.

Because suburbia isn't near any work places, or shops, or anything that produces or does anything. It's just near more suburbia.

The upshot was if suburbia wants to survive it actually has to somehow subsidise its own growing travel/transport expenses and growing its own food was a short term option that could save it, at least for a while, unless you are in McMansion suburbia where the house takes up 95% of the block in which case you are fucked and had better start growing marijuana under lamps to pay off your utterly insane mortgage.

And you know in the old days suburbs had corner stores and were near parks and shops and work places and everyone had gardens with vegetables and fruit and god damn chickens. It's a crime that them modern type kids these days with their mobile phones and their bird flu and their dungarees have driven chickens out of suburbia to the point of having zoning regulations against them.

I mean screw being an idiot if you don't buy organic food, you're an idiot if you don't GROW organic food. There, I'm saying, it if you don't have your own free range chickens you are an idiot. I once lived without them for a few years and it was INSANITY.

[RandomCasualty2]

What part of "restructuring the financial system such that more people own property and debt has been a Republican platform item for years" do you not understand? The Republican legislature has been working on the creation and maintenance of a housing bubble for a decade, the fact that it's a really stupid plan and destroyed a trillion dollars out of the economy was a predictable result. The last eight years have come with the slowest job expansion of any administration in the previous 75 years.

It's a really big deal. The Republicans have handled the economy the worst it has been handled in modern times. These guys are really really bad at this.

Honestly I don't know why people support the Republicans at all. Every fucking time we get a republican president, no good comes of it. The economy goes to hell and the national debt skyrockets become of some kind of war. Really, I can't think of anything good that came out of a Republican president's term of office since I've been alive.

Why does anyone vote for those fucktards?

[Crissa]

Price for tomatoes this week: 99¢ per lb for hothouse Mexico grown. $2.99 for Canadian. Same for local. Heirloom (also picked too soon so they'd appear on regular supermarket instead of the grocer) were down to 2.99 this week; usually 4.99-5.99 for good ones.

Price for bananas: 79¢ per lb.

Corn is highly seasonal, we consider it lucky if we get 25¢ an ear, but $1 per is more common for the processed high-quality ears.

These are conventional foods that are available all year because we can grow them all year round, hence the prices.

Organic tomatoes: $2.99 (Mexico)

Organic bananas: 99¢ per lb.

There's just no excuse for seeing super high multipliers for organic foods. Admittedly, it is more seasonal, and gets hit harder by changes in the environment. So if you're expecting the same lettuce every day of the year, it will spike.

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

Honestly I don't know why people support the Republicans at all. Every fucking time we get a republican president, no good comes of it. The economy goes to hell and the national debt skyrockets become of some kind of war. Really, I can't think of anything good that came out of a Republican president's term of office since I've been alive.

Why does anyone vote for those fucktards?

Well as much as recent economic history seems to be favoring the democrats

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31view.html

http://rtorgerson.blogspot.com/2004/06/ ... lican.html

There are a number of reasonable people who believe that Reagan deserves the credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
The people who believe that he was aiding Islamic terrorists are dismissed as loons.

[tzor]

When a drug user is suffering from withdrawal symptoms he could blame the moment when he started experiencing the symptoms. In reality he should be blaming the point where he was taking all those damn drugs. This is likewise true for the economy. While it’s always in fashion to blame everything on Bush, the fact is that we’ve been on a drug induced financial market ever since the Dot Com Era. (It all depends on what your definition of “is” is right?) Once the Dot Com bubble burst the bastards simply ran under the leaves and found the next damn scam to come along, which was hiding questionable loans in questionable derivatives while credit agencies deliberately sold their ratings on these derivatives like cheap two bit whores.

The notion that everyone deserves to own their own home, even if they couldn’t physically afford it was a keystone of Obama’s policy while he was rushing up the post 9/11 ladder during the housing bubble. I realize that everyone else would rather pin it on Bush, but alas it isn’t so. All we, like lemmings, have gone astray.

[Cynic]

The notion that everyone deserves to own their own home, even if they couldn’t physically afford it was a keystone of Obama’s policy while he was rushing up the post 9/11 ladder during the housing bubble. I realize that everyone else would rather pin it on Bush, but alas it isn’t so. All we, like lemmings, have gone astray.

Wait are you blaming the housing bubble burst on Obama? Are you fucking nut? Obama was a two-bit senator from the middle of no-where with nothing but a smile and a talk. Seriously, he didn't start shining until the Bush V Kerry election. He was a name before that yes but only a name. His speech at the DNC at Kerry's nomination is what really propelled him into the limelight and got his talk into action.

Really, I"m not an OBama fanboy. In fact, I don't like either of our two candidates right now. But pinning the idiocy on Obama is like saying that the Yankees lost the season because of a streaker in the second game of the season.

[Username17]

Keystone of Obama's Policies? Dude tzor, it was article two of the 2004 Republican Party National Platform. There is no way you can get away from this or pin it on Democrats. It was the second biggest objective on the Republican plate.

But of course really it goes back to Milton Friedman in 1973. The myth of the peaceful victory of his aggressively harmful policies is probably the single largest specter haunting public policy debate today. The fact is that markets do not function without regulation, they are not self correcting, and the Chicago School policies that tell us to electrify the genitals of anyone who gets in the way of trying to make the markets run that way have killed and starved as many people as Stalin ever did.

And while the Democrats are hardly blameless in the rush to the failed experiments in tearing down the New Deal, don't even fucking try to delude us into thinking that this has ever been anything other than a primarily Republican plan. From Chile to El Salvador it has always been you guys who have been beating and killing people in order to advance this economic plan. And now that you've done it, you get to act surprised that it still doesn't work!

Right now the Republicans have bully boys in Bolivia who are shooting people in the street with automatic weapons in order to protect this exact economic model that is also causing the collapse of AIG. Not only is it your fault tzor, but it's a bad plan. It's your plan. And the things you've done to put it into motion are bad things.

There will be a reckoning. Just remember which side you were on. I certainly will.

-Username17

[SphereOfFeetMan]

In Obama's words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKmpQJ3CBE

[JonSetanta]

I forgot to mention, and since FoneLobstar brought up the chickens, my family grows a variety of vegetables. The back yard was orange dirt when we got here more than a decade ago but since then it's been fertilized and tree'd until it can support life once more.
At least 40 years ago it was farmland; the whole hilly neighborhood was built on top of old cow pastures and smothered with trees.

While I did mention the at-times atrocious tomato prices, it does vary by store. They can be acquired cheap but tend to be bruised and sometimes overripe.
We grow our own between spring to fall, along with cucumbers, pumpkins, sunflowers, raspberries (along a fence, imported by bird shit), strawberries, and very small plums (but very, very, nice compared to store bought).
And this isn't a farm. It's just a hundred square feet or so in the back yard.

Unfortunately, we also have deer, along with most of east coast regions. Josh probably knows what I mean.
They are like gigantic hooved rats, plump on the abundance of tree-bordered suburbia, and they bring lime disease ticks in along with devouring any plant matter they can get their tiny mouths on.
If you grow anything, you must also protect it, and that's where the problem lies when attempting to fight overpriced produce.

[Koumei]

We grow our own lemons and mandarins, but that's about it. I intend on growing poppies, soon. Because opium tea is totally legal to consume on your own, and sounds like a great form of pain relief.

The fact is that markets do not function without regulation, they are not self correcting, and the Chicago School policies that tell us to electrify the genitals of anyone who gets in the way of trying to make the markets run that way have killed and starved as many people as Stalin ever did.

Now, I know you're quite the Stalin fan, and I'll admit that I like the good things he did (directly or indirectly) and his moustache, despite taking issue with the number of people he killed, but is that actually true? Have they in fact killed that many people, presumably by encouraging barely-covert invasions of other countries to kill people, cause rebellions and overthrow governments?

[PhoneLobster]

Oh boohoo you got deer.

You're in suburbia. It's built up and surrounded by layer upon layer of fences and more suburbia. If it isn't you're clearly doing it wrong. Put up some electrified barbed wire fences or something, gee, how hard is that? Even the guys you torture have those surrounding where they live.

You know what we have "deer" as well. Only ours can leap a mighty barbed wire fence in a single casual bound, disembowel a man with a single swipe of their powerful rear paws and just in case they die carry a spare miniature copy of themselves in their front pocket.

We'd get rid of them if they weren't so useful for riding to work.

[Username17]

Now, I know you're quite the Stalin fan, and I'll admit that I like the good things he did (directly or indirectly) and his moustache, despite taking issue with the number of people he killed, but is that actually true? Have they in fact killed that many people, presumably by encouraging barely-covert invasions of other countries to kill people, cause rebellions and overthrow governments?

Easily. It's harder to tabulate, since Stalin was a big fan of explicit empire and Friedman was a proponent of implicit empire. But massacres done in Friedman's name extend from Chile to Iraq to Indonesia; and the murder record is really really big. Stalin himself ended his reign (and thus his death toll) in 1953, but Friedman's reign of terror is based on policy implementations that he never himself made - thus meaning that his book keeps killing fools even in death.

It's harder to say whether the US's implicit empire killed more people than the USSR's explicit empire did during the Cold Way (1945 - 1989). Certainly we have a lot of blood on our hands from East Pakistan to Angola, and it competes quite well with the Hungarian crackdown and the Siberian Gulags. The fact that the Soviet Union's narrative was that they were responsible for the lives (and thus the deaths) of every single person in the empire; while the United States' narrative was and is that they aren't responsible for anything means that it is very difficult to o an apples to apples comparison.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

You're in suburbia. It's built up and surrounded by layer upon layer of fences and more suburbia.

We have no fences in this region. In fact, there's no sidewalks, street lights, shared water supply, or police department either. The term is 'living in bumfuck', although it would probably apply to you moreso.
You're not the first to assume though. It's quite disturbing that so many non-Americans assume all of middle-class American life not found in shit-wallowing cities or sheep-raping farmland is like Beverly Hills.

[Crissa]

whine, deer, whine?

If you can't handle some little deer, sheesh.

-Crissa

[tzor]

Keystone of Obama's Policies? Dude tzor, it was article two of the 2004 Republican Party National Platform. There is no way you can get away from this or pin it on Democrats. It was the second biggest objective on the Republican plate.

Damn it, where's me can of Spinach? That's all I can stand and I can't stands no more. This is bullshit the apple is not the orange. The 2004 GOP Platform didn't have "articles." The second section was entitled "ownership."

USHERING IN AN OWNERSHIP ERA

“The role of government is not to control or dominate the lives of our citizens. The role of government is to help our citizens gain the time and the tools to make their own choices and improve their own lives. That’s why I will continue to work to usher in a new era of ownership and opportunity in America.”

— President George W. Bush

Ownership gives citizens a vital stake in their communities and their country. By expanding ownership, we will help turn economic growth into lasting prosperity. As Republicans, we trust people to make decisions about how to spend, save, and invest their own money. We want individuals to own and control their income. We want people to have a tangible asset that they can build and rely on, making their own choices and directing their own future. Ownership should not be the preserve of the wealthy or the privileged. As Republicans who believe in the power of ownership to create better lives, we want more people to own a home. We want more people to own and build small businesses. We want more people to own and control their health care. We want more people to own personal retirement accounts. With President Bush’s leadership we have
taken great strides in making the dream of ownership available to millions of Americans, and in the next four years the President and Republicans in Congress will unlock the door to ownership for many more.

...

Homeownership

Homeownership is central to the American dream, and Republicans want to make it a reality for everyone. That starts with access to capital for entrepreneurs and access to credit for consumers. Both have improved immensely in the past four years, resulting in record levels of homeownership. For the first time, more than half of all minorities own their home. We support the President’s goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families by the end of the decade. Since President Bush announced his initiative in 2002, an additional 1.6 million minorities have become homeowners. The Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program helps low-income families purchase a home. The most significant barrier to homeownership is the down payment. We support efforts to reduce that barrier, like the American Dream Downpayment Act and Zero Downpayment Mortgages. The President and Congress have taken action to provide counseling and education to help first-time homebuyers navigate the process of buying a home. The Administration has also taken steps to alert people to the dangers of predatory lending, in an effort to help Americans maintain a positive credit history.

Affordable housing is in the national interest. That is why the mortgage interest deduction for primary residences was put into the federal tax code and why tax reform of any kind should continue to encourage homeownership. We support efforts to enact the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit. At the same time, a balanced national housing policy must recognize that decent housing includes apartments, and addresses the needs of all citizens, including renters.

In many areas, housing prices are higher than they need to be because of regulations that drive up building costs. Some regulation is of course necessary, and so is sensible zoning. We urge states and localities to work with local builders and lenders to eliminate unnecessary burdens that price many families out of the market. We see no role for any federal regulation of homebuilding. We do foresee a larger role for state and local governments in controlling the federally assisted housing that has been so poorly managed from Washington. We also encourage the modification of restrictions that inhibit the rehabilitation of existing distressed properties.

With the sole exception of zero down payment there is no mention of giving a person a home no matter what the cost, there is no mention of bundling risky loans in complex "insured" derivative packages and there is certainly no call for adjustable rate mortgages that will almost certainly cause bankruptcy in a few years unless the homeowner manages to dump the house on the market for a profit. The notion that any of the current crisis in the mortgage industry can be found in this platform is plain old ordinary BULLSHIT.

[Crissa]

It's bullshit that the platform has the exact types of loans which have gone upside down and sour?

You don't make sense, tzor.

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

Unfortunately, we also have deer, along with most of east coast regions. Josh probably knows what I mean.

Dude, I'm 600 miles from the coast and in the middle of a major city, so we only set State records for deer:

http://fieldandstream.blogs.com/whiteta ... ub-32.html

http://madriver-outdooradventures.blogs ... -buck.html

See also "bitter voters"

Edit: I'll have to look into this though Atlatl deer hunting may be legal in the local playground

[Leress]

You're in suburbia. It's built up and surrounded by layer upon layer of fences and more suburbia.

We have no fences in this region. In fact, there's no sidewalks, street lights, shared water supply, or police department either. The term is 'living in bumfuck', although it would probably apply to you moreso.
You're not the first to assume though. It's quite disturbing that so many non-Americans assume all of middle-class American life not found in shit-wallowing cities or sheep-raping farmland is like Beverly Hills.

As a Mississippian, I have to respond. Just this...

http://earthfriendlygardening.wordpress ... ling-deer/

problem solved

You could also put soap on stakes around the garden.

[Koumei]

Another natural way of repelling deer

Not a Rickroll. Actually, that would have been pretty funny if it was.

[PhoneLobster]

And this isn't a farm. It's just a hundred square feet or so in the back yard.

That seemed pretty much like a description of suburbia. At best an "old suburb" like a small town.

Try to be consistent with your fictional persona and its living arrangements.

[Neeeek]

Not a Rickroll.

How disappointing. I like that song.

How about a BarackRoll

[Draco_Argentum]

Its not an article, its a section. Frank you are sooo fucking wrong!!!!!!!!!!!

[Username17]

Its not an article, its a section. Frank you are sooo fucking wrong!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, since misrepresenting a section as an article is "ordinary BULLSHIT" according to the right-wing think tanks that hand puppet tzor, I guess that claiming to have been against a bridge to nowhere when you are on record as having specifically campaigned in favor of the bridge is extraordinary BULLSHIT?

I'm really at a loss here, as the American Heritage Dictionary defines "article" as

A particular section or item of a series in a written document, as in a contract, constitution, or treaty.

So according to my understanding of American English I actually can use those two words interchangeably. Apparently tzor knows better and I'm sure that he'll be willing to educate us in this minutiae rather than confront the fact that John McCain was personally hip deep in bribes from the Keating Five back in the first Savings and Loan debacle back in the eighties. Or that he's hip deep in the current credit crunch as well.

The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.

-Username17