foodandart

Oh, you better believe I do this each. and. every. fucking. time those cocksuckers call.

I figure the call is on their dime, so I'm going to do my damnedest to turn it into a dollar.

Same with the asshats from India that are from 'Windows Computer' and try to get me to open up my system.. (Thing is, I have Macs, and run Parallels with an ancient install of XP to play games on. It goes online easily enough and would love, just love to get one of those 7-zip bombs - the ones that open and open and open and have some iterative code so it keeps opening until it chokes the hosts computer. I'd love to get one and name the file Financial Data 2014 and leave it on the XP desktop and let the fuckers grab it.)

Last time the Windows computer guys called, I played the little old lady routine and tried, just honestly tried for the better part of half an hour to get my system online so they could help me../s

Oh, don't you know it.

I've been in the Nielsen's now for 15 years - in their 'Homescan' survey which is now called the National Consumer Panel..these people know exactly what America buys, thinks and eats for breakfast.

Being in the survey for as long as I have, I've become REAL adept at avoiding a lot of the fads that are marketed to the public, though that's only as I see the questions related to the marketing of goods beforehand.

Omega-3's? Saw that 6 months before everyone started using it to pitch products. Gluten? Yup, knew that one was coming as well. Same for 'pro-biotics'.

It's all in the pipeline, all waiting to be launched by marketers.

One thing to note, that as we have, in the last 5 years really made an effort to move away from industrially produced food products and shift to second-hand goods, the survey questions have dropped off noticeably. What that tells me, is that NCP, which does aggregate and sell consumer data to the manufacturers, doesn't have any producers that are marketing towards the local, small markets or the downwardly-mobile.

I wonder how long before some concern tries to work out how to go after this segment of the population. Given the absolute shit state the economy is for the 90 million that have dropped out of the workforce, it's no small target for any business that can sell to this demographic.

The one thing I've learned in the 15 years in this survey is businesses are whores who'll do anything for customers, it won't be long before they start to show up and NCP starts sniffing around asking questions on their behalf.

Were you lied to or did you just not have a clue? I lived on a farm when I was a teenager and we slaughtered our own poultry and hogs and it was not ever a nice affair. What gets me is how gross an industrial slaughterhouse line is. Filthy things.

As to the cruelty, I've seen dogs rip apart rabbits and squirrels and cats do in rodents slowly, killing them only after ripping them apart in play (and in many instances the prey wasn't even eaten) so the idea that an animal becoming food is a kind or gentle thing when a human kills to eat strikes me a bit laughable.

This is life on planet earth and it is cruel. Nature is cruel, we react to that cruelty as if we are somehow NOT animals on the earth and not bound to the same cycle of life and death. When there's an animal that's going to be made into dinner, we are NO different than any other meat-eating predator on earth - I learned that before I was a freshman in high school.

Oh, but don't you recall? The ACA was supposed to stop all this!

I've an aunt who's deductible is so high she won't let her MD order the tests that are needed to work out why she's got intestinal issues.. God save you once you get over 60, the insurance companies really fuck you - hard - before you are eligible to go on Medicare. She's hoping that she can hold on for another 5 years until then.

We SO need a single payer system.

If you run virtualization, get one of those 7-zip bombs that contains no data but just opens, and opens, and opens and will eventually write itself across an entire hard drive and choke the computer that opened it. I've played the daft old lady game as well, and I think 33 minutes was my limit with them.. I run a Mac with OS X and do have a Parallels VM installed that is WindowsXP. I'm going to make a new VM and load it one fine day and hopefully have one of those 7-zip bombs renamed "Financial Statements 2014" on the desktop and let them into the machine and take it...

Delete VM when done, rinse and repeat.

Have fun kittens!