Soup of the Day
An ongoing (hopefully) thread that will change day to day via whatever topic strikes the fancy.
Starting it off is my observation about "black Friday" and my impression that this is some mad marketing phrase they coined just this year because I don't recall it ever before. Lets hope it's truly not a black day with horrible sales because it would probably hammer away at the market place and stocks.
Stock Market and it's evils is something I abhor though and I wouldn't mind seeing it all take a massive tumble into the toilet and never rise again. Corporate laws and corporate America are in my opinion the modern day robber barons. We cater to wall street so much we have forgot about main street and the average person has been crushed under the wheels of greed.
Sadly though the rush of greed hasn't had an ounce of common sense in it's rush to milk the dollar to death and its going to bury this country in an economic collapse I factor. Once enough jobs and homes have been lost and the base of the country's finances, the working people, start to go under they are going to take the whole mess down with them.
It's all a house of cards and someone just needs to open a window or door and the howling wind will blow it all away. Gas and Diesel are just some of the insane inflationary items that are hammering nails in our coffins. The cost of living has rose considerably and it seems everyone is out to get rich off of you. Eggs are now 2 dollars a dozen, that is just madness.
Those that think its all fine and dandy and aren't feeling the crunch should be awakened because parts of this country are hurting and we don't live in a vacuum.
I wouldn't be looking to the politicians to solve anything because they have been entrenched in a system of corruption that has perpetuated this problem so long they will be going down with the ship instead of working to bail it out and patch the hull.
Tough times lurk ahead for us all if things don't take a turn I am afraid.
Actually, as to black Friday, I've heard it for several years now. That name isn't anything new.
Quote from: Locutus on November 24, 2007, 08:43:18 PM
Actually, as to black Friday, I've heard it for several years now. That name isn't anything new.
Great, now I have sidestepped into yet another alternate universe. See, I have only heard that term used for bad days on the stock market and it's a real (excuse the pun) dark name to use for the jolly happy time of the beginning of the Christmas season.
It's probably some higher brain function thats triggering some sort of quantum leap because Lord only knows I haven't tampered with any subatomic fields that I can recall lately. This sort of stuff gets old because it's so subtle thus making it extremely hard to get back to what one would think of as one's original reality.
Did anyone shop online?
Quote from: Mother_Earth on November 25, 2007, 05:44:57 AM
Did anyone shop online?
I do all the time, in fact if it's not consumables I am looking for it online.
lol I have even started shopping for a new woman online through one of the online services. What the heck, I get everything else online, why not?
Lex - black actually means it is a good day for stores. They aren't "in the red" so to speak. I think a lot of retail shops stay in the red for most of the year and the Christmas season digs them out of the hole.
I worked at the mall in college - I hate black Friday!
I did do a little shopping online already. I like to go on and comparison shop before I go out into the stores.
There is no beating online shopping. No crowds and parking problems, and the goods are delivered right to your front door. It can't be beat.
Quote from: kimmi on November 25, 2007, 01:37:57 PM
Lex - black actually means it is a good day for stores. They aren't "in the red" so to speak. I think a lot of retail shops stay in the red for most of the year and the Christmas season digs them out of the hole.
I worked at the mall in college - I hate black Friday!
I did do a little shopping online already. I like to go on and comparison shop before I go out into the stores.
Everyone from this particular universe says that about "Black Friday". Did you guys ever have a massive stock market crash years ago? There might be one Monday if this "Black Friday"'s sales are in the toilet.
Quote from: Locutus on November 25, 2007, 07:57:20 PM
There is no beating online shopping. No crowds and parking problems, and the goods are delivered right to your front door. It can't be beat.
One has to wonder if it's not the most fuel efficient, and therefore "Green" way to shop?
Quote from: lex on November 25, 2007, 12:20:24 PM
I do all the time, in fact if it's not consumables I am looking for it online.
lol I have even started shopping for a new woman online through one of the online services. What the heck, I get everything else online, why not?
Just one? I can direct you to quite a few. Lot's of promising people out there, I can't keep up with them all. :wink:
Quote from: pariann on November 25, 2007, 08:19:13 PM
Lot's of promising people out there, I can't keep up with them all. :wink:
:sarcasm:
Divorce has left me gun shy, with a self esteem envied only by garden slugs. :dam: I figure if I shop the online service I might find one with lower self esteem than me and with no expectations and perhaps I might, MIGHT venture a conversation with her. All in all it would probably be a less painful experience to just beat my nuts flat with a wooden mallet and forget about the whole concept of having another woman in my life than to try dating at this point of time in my life. I am not even close to being ready for it, but I am lonely as hell and half crazy with a miserable heartbreak. :wacko: :wall:
Oh well, more angst to fuel my madness to workout more. :pink:
Wow, that's pretty extreme. Somehow, I just don't believe your self esteem is damaged as much as you claim..anyway, I hope not.
Quote from: Mother_Earth on November 26, 2007, 01:06:27 PM
Wow, that's pretty extreme. Somehow, I just don't believe your self esteem is damaged as much as you claim..anyway, I hope not.
It is. And along with chronic clinical depression I have a lovely time of it. It's probably a good thing I got sick and almost died. I may have got that kind of drama out of my system for a while, enough to get me through Winter would be good.
When I was young and in the infantry I almost froze to death while on a training exercise in Korea. The near death experience of it made me always want to choose freezing to death if I was ever going to have to pick my own doom. It's peaceful and rather painless, you just go to sleep and not wake up.
I figure one some super cold night I would drive out to some secluded spot at the nearby lake, drink some whiskey and take some pills, roll down the windows and just go to sleep.
Pesky problem is waking up damned to hell for it. If I could get around that annoying fly in the ointment I would be giddy about the whole plan. But I gotta stick around and make the best of things and try to do some good while I am here. Meh! :-\
I seriously have to keep on my meds and keep rolling as a moving target from despair. There are times it all catches up with me and I feel like I could just die from sadness it's so heavy. But tomorrow is another day, and lightning can strike and life can take a turn on a dime. More than likely one just keeps plugging along making whatever improvements they can, as they can, until they find themselves in a better place.
Having the lion's share of the blame for my situation adds to my self loathing. I have hated myself to the point of wanting to damn myself to hell. But I frankly chicken out, mostly from a deep seeded fear of hell from childhood.
When I was very young I would have night terrors about hell. I couldn't be woken up from them unless they shoved my head in a sink and dumped cold water on my head for a while. I guess I would scream in my sleep like bloody murder. I can recall parts of those nightmares even to this day.
So hell for me is SERIOUS BUSINESS!! lol :pope:
It all gets better. I hope that you can one day be med free. :)
Quote from: pariann on November 27, 2007, 01:33:03 PM
It all gets better. I hope that you can one day be med free. :)
Yeah, me too. I hate meds.
We hates them precious!
Quote from: lex on November 27, 2007, 12:56:27 PM
When I was young and in the infantry I almost froze to death while on a training exercise in Korea. The near death experience of it made me always want to choose freezing to death if I was ever going to have to pick my own doom. It's peaceful and rather painless, you just go to sleep and not wake up.
So hell for me is SERIOUS BUSINESS!! lol :pope:
Though you're clinically depressed, self confidence comes through in your posts. I know it's popular now to treat depression mainly with medicine, but I hope you're getting conselling with a professional therapist. You're too intelligent to allow some woman to destroy you.
Quote from: Mother_Earth on December 01, 2007, 05:52:33 AM
Though you're clinically depressed, self confidence comes through in your posts. I know it's popular now to treat depression mainly with medicine, but I hope you're getting conselling with a professional therapist. You're too intelligent to allow some woman to destroy you.
Thanks for the encouragement. Madmen are generally self confident. No therapist, the one that was any good here in this small town left us. She got me through the really rough parts at first where I was pretty close to offing myself. She left and I ignored her advice of staying away from my X, thus I went through another major bout with depression that torpedoed a lot of my progress.
Just picking up the pieces now. I feel sometimes like I am just running out of gas. It's been a long road and I can understand why we die. We just get tired and wear out and welcome the big dirt nap. Immortality in this form would be truly maddening.
Find another one!
Time to change gears and the flavor of soup.
Dairy prices! What has become of the prices of stuff that comes from cows, and chickens too. Eggs have shot up so high in price, I am going to stop eating them. Cottage cheese has doubled in price!!?? What kind of BS is this?
Is it just these things? Has prices rose on other stuff? Are these high gas prices finally coming to hose us on stuff at the grocery store too now? How come only I don't hear people howling about this stuff?
I have noticed it too. Just yesterday I went to buy chocolate milk to make hot chocolate for my class and a half gallon was almost 3 dollars. We have Lowes foods here and they use green stamp points. I use my points for milk and butter. I have been buying store brand items for quite a while now, but even they are going really high. I guess the one thing about groceries that is different than gas is that we can choose not to buy something at the grocery store and replace it with something else - buying chicken thighs instead of chicken breast. I'm a coupon clipper. I try and save $20 - $40 each time I go with coupons and store discounts. That has helped! I will say this, the cost of groceries has made me COOK more. It is too expensive to buy premade items and it is just all around better for me too.
Lunch meat is the worst! Since when is a turkey breast worth $8 a pound?
I am beginning to wonder if this isn't the beginning of inflation from the minimum wage hike. The last time they increased minimum wages I watch the prices of everything go up for years to compensate for it and it made things far worse than it ever did help.
What these morons in Gov can't seem to get through their granite thick skulls is that minimum wage is related to inflation massively. See, our dollar isn't based off of jack shit any more. It used to be based off of a gold or silver standard once upon a time, but now it's just backed by our bullshit of saying that it's worth something. Our dollar is now falling in value, in Europe its taken a header, but we don't notice or care because the closest thing to noticing foreign currency is the Canadian quarters in our change.
Anyway, the only thing that has a standard on it relating to our dollar is minimum wage. It states that for our dollar you get X amount of time of labor. Now granted this labor is mostly unskilled, but its at least some kind of standard to which our dollar has some value attached to it. When you boil it down there is only two things you can get with money, goods and services. There is no dollar standard government protected for goods, but with the minimum wage there is somewhat on services.
Ok, given all of that, when you raise minimum wage, you decrease the worth of the dollar via it's only standard. By raising minimum wage, you decrease the value of the dollar. The people that get hurt the most by this are the people who are already struggling at the bottom who work for minimum wages.
See, businesses and corporations aren't going to take a profit hit over this, they will raise their prices to compensate. Everyone raises their prices to make up for this. So the increase in wage you get at the low end is quickly consumed by the inflation of prices. As this inflation cycles through the system, people are far, far worse off than before the increase of wage.
The only way you climb up the wage ladder is by increasing your wages personally. We'd be far better off spending money in supplementing getting people better job training and some education than messing with the minimum wages. American workerss are falling so far behind the world in skill it's pathetic.
Anyway, I had forgot about the minimum wage hike. I knew it would come burn us, but I was hoping it wouldn't be noticeable so soon. I could be wrong about it being related to the eggs and dairy, but who knows? I am sure our gas prices have something to do with our dollar SUCKING compared to the Euro. They will NOT sell us gas at a loss when they can sell it abroad for more, so we will get burned by our pathetic dollar.
Quote from: lex on December 05, 2007, 10:24:09 AM
I am beginning to wonder if this isn't the beginning of inflation from the minimum wage hike. The last time they increased minimum wages I watch the prices of everything go up for years to compensate for it and it made things far worse than it ever did help.
What these morons in Gov can't seem to get through their granite thick skulls is that minimum wage is related to inflation massively. See, our dollar isn't based off of jack shit any more. It used to be based off of a gold or silver standard once upon a time, but now it's just backed by our bullshit of saying that it's worth something. Our dollar is now falling in value, in Europe its taken a header, but we don't notice or care because the closest thing to noticing foreign currency is the Canadian quarters in our change.
Anyway, the only thing that has a standard on it relating to our dollar is minimum wage. It states that for our dollar you get X amount of time of labor. Now granted this labor is mostly unskilled, but its at least some kind of standard to which our dollar has some value attached to it. When you boil it down there is only two things you can get with money, goods and services. There is no dollar standard government protected for goods, but with the minimum wage there is somewhat on services.
Ok, given all of that, when you raise minimum wage, you decrease the worth of the dollar via it's only standard. By raising minimum wage, you decrease the value of the dollar. The people that get hurt the most by this are the people who are already struggling at the bottom who work for minimum wages.
See, businesses and corporations aren't going to take a profit hit over this, they will raise their prices to compensate. Everyone raises their prices to make up for this. So the increase in wage you get at the low end is quickly consumed by the inflation of prices. As this inflation cycles through the system, people are far, far worse off than before the increase of wage.
The only way you climb up the wage ladder is by increasing your wages personally. We'd be far better off spending money in supplementing getting people better job training and some education than messing with the minimum wages. American workerss are falling so far behind the world in skill it's pathetic.
Anyway, I had forgot about the minimum wage hike. I knew it would come burn us, but I was hoping it wouldn't be noticeable so soon. I could be wrong about it being related to the eggs and dairy, but who knows? I am sure our gas prices have something to do with our dollar SUCKING compared to the Euro. They will NOT sell us gas at a loss when they can sell it abroad for more, so we will get burned by our pathetic dollar.
The Dem's would try to convince you otherwise though. IIRC I stated almost the same thing before this even passed in some other threads and was told I was full of it. I even know some people who were due raised that didn't get them because of the minimum wage hike so they actually lost ground because the raise they were scheduled for would have had them making just over what they are making with the min wage increase. WTG Dem's.....
Quote from: lex on December 05, 2007, 10:24:09 AM
I am beginning to wonder if this isn't the beginning of inflation from the minimum wage hike. The last time they increased minimum wages I watch the prices of everything go up for years to compensate for it and it made things far worse than it ever did help.
What these morons in Gov can't seem to get through their granite thick skulls is that minimum wage is related to inflation massively. See, our dollar isn't based off of jack shit any more. It used to be based off of a gold or silver standard once upon a time, but now it's just backed by our bullshit of saying that it's worth something. Our dollar is now falling in value, in Europe its taken a header, but we don't notice or care because the closest thing to noticing foreign currency is the Canadian quarters in our change.
Anyway, the only thing that has a standard on it relating to our dollar is minimum wage. It states that for our dollar you get X amount of time of labor. Now granted this labor is mostly unskilled, but its at least some kind of standard to which our dollar has some value attached to it. When you boil it down there is only two things you can get with money, goods and services. There is no dollar standard government protected for goods, but with the minimum wage there is somewhat on services.
Ok, given all of that, when you raise minimum wage, you decrease the worth of the dollar via it's only standard. By raising minimum wage, you decrease the value of the dollar. The people that get hurt the most by this are the people who are already struggling at the bottom who work for minimum wages.
See, businesses and corporations aren't going to take a profit hit over this, they will raise their prices to compensate. Everyone raises their prices to make up for this. So the increase in wage you get at the low end is quickly consumed by the inflation of prices. As this inflation cycles through the system, people are far, far worse off than before the increase of wage.
The only way you climb up the wage ladder is by increasing your wages personally. We'd be far better off spending money in supplementing getting people better job training and some education than messing with the minimum wages. American workerss are falling so far behind the world in skill it's pathetic.
Anyway, I had forgot about the minimum wage hike. I knew it would come burn us, but I was hoping it wouldn't be noticeable so soon. I could be wrong about it being related to the eggs and dairy, but who knows? I am sure our gas prices have something to do with our dollar SUCKING compared to the Euro. They will NOT sell us gas at a loss when they can sell it abroad for more, so we will get burned by our pathetic dollar.
LEX, that is what consevatives have been saying for years.............why is it, that this does not make sense to the opposition?...it is really basic math.
Nice explaination.. ;) :yes:
Quote from: Henry Hawk on December 05, 2007, 12:29:15 PM
LEX, that is what consevatives have been saying for years.............why is it, that this does not make sense to the opposition?...it is really basic math.
Nice explaination.. ;) :yes:
Is this where we get to say "told ya so" HH? :biggrin:
:wink: ;D