Junk Food Not Cheaper Than Healthy Food

WASHINGTON -- It doesn't cost any more to eat healthy food than it does to eat junk food, a government study found, casting doubt on the popular belief that many people can't afford healthful foods.

The study, released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Economic Research Service, found that foods like beans, carrots, milk, and yogurt are actually less expensive than ice cream sandwiches, cinnamon buns, and soda.

One reason that many people assume junk food is more affordable is because many studies that compare the cost of unhealthy foods with healthy ones use cost-per-calorie as a measurement.

By this metric, vegetables and fruit are relatively more expensive ways to consume "food energy" (i.e., calories) because they don't contain many calories, whereas less healthy foods (also called "moderation foods&quot , which tend to be high in saturated fat and sugar, are a cheaper way to consume a lot of calories.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/DietNutrition/32762?

Potential Consequences of a Greek Exit

As the possibility of Greece failing to establish a "pro-Euro" government and leaving the Union rises with every passing day, it is helpful to consider, to the best of our ability, the potential consequences of such an event. Business Insider has compiled a ROUGH guide to such consequences based on the past few months of analysis from various sources. I emphasize the word "rough" because none of these things are certain, and all of the "analysts" of this Greek tragedy are little more than curious speculators at this point (that includes me).

Still, it is very likely that at least a few of the following 14 things will come to pass in some way, shape or form. I chose to leave out three slides from the original article, but you can see them all by following the link in red. Here is Simone Foxman with the potential consequences:

http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/potential-consequences-of-a-greek-exit.html

Sick puppy......he must of been rejoicing when those Buddhas ...

Cognitive capitalism...

Knowledge Work Under Cognitive Capitalism

What do the Austrian-born, self-styled "social ecologist" and management theorist Peter Drucker and the Italian autonomist Marxist scholar Paolo Virno have in common? At first blush, little beyond their Continental birthplaces. Steeped in different philosophical traditions and lifestyle habits, Drucker was vehemently anti-Marxist and accustomed to a comfortable middle-class existence, while Virno - together with other autonomists, the most famous of which is Antonio Negri - did hard jail time due to their political activities.[1] Drucker's consultancy occurred within the corporation's confines, while Negri, Virno and their associates directed their praxis at the street level, engaging with Italian workers. Yet this workerist movement was no less theorized, precisely from the "inside," than Drucker's own efforts to understand management's role in a reconstituted form of capitalism. Negri, Virno, Mario Tronti and other autonomist theorists talked of "immaterial" and "social" labor - thus extending the Marxist concept of labor to discuss a form of capitalism based on the "general intellect," a term adopted from Marx himself.[2]

Here, then, is the connection: Drucker and the autonomists simultaneously tried to pinpoint certain deep-seated and structurally transformative tendencies in Western capitalism, society and modernity to move to a form of postindustrial economy that focuses on the production and consumption of knowledge and symbolic goods as a higher-order economic activity that encompasses and affects the entire social fabric. Drucker used the label "post-capitalist society," but his depiction of this new social formation's contours strikingly parallels key tenets of cognitive capitalism. In this new capitalist phase, social knowledge, embodied in the general intellect and diffused throughout the workforce, is the key productive force (Virno 2004). In this paper, we argue that Drucker not only presages the autonomist notion of immaterial labor at cognitive capitalism's heart; his work also points toward, but never fully develops, a theory of self-organized knowledge labor. This is the very thing that autonomists, including Negri himself, call for: the self-management of society's intellectual resources.

Before we continue, we would like to offer the following parameters for what we mean when we speak of "cognitive capitalism," a term sometimes used differently by different thinkers. From Michael A. Peters' 2011 book, "Cognitive Capitalism, Education and the Question of Digital Labor":

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9035-knowledge-work-under-cognitive-capitalism

Ridley Scott’s New Blade Runner Film Will Be Sequel

A month shy of Blade Runner’s 30th anniversary, word has come down that Ridley Scott will direct a sequel to the groundbreaking sci-fi film, with original screenwriter Hampton Fancher in talks to develop the screenplay.

News that Scott would helm a new Blade Runner movie came out a while back, but up until now it was unclear if the film would be a prequel, sequel or something else entirely. Beyond the clarity that the movie will indeed be a sequel, few details about its actual premise have been released.

“The filmmakers would reveal only that the new story will take place some years after the first film concluded,” production company Alcon Entertainment said in a statement announcing the sequel to the 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

However, as The Mary Sue points out, Scott noted recently that he’s looking to have a female lead in the film. Since Scott has already said Harrison Ford likely won’t be returning to reprise his role as “blade runner” Rick Deckard, having an amazing female lead holds the potential for true awesomeness.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/ridley-scott-blade-runner-sequel/?

Arizona....AGAIN....wtf...

Arizona official: It's 'possible' Obama won't make ballot

WASHINGTON -- In a revival of the controversy surrounding President Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate, a state official in Arizona says it’s “possible” that he’ll hold Obama’s name off the Arizona ballot if Hawaii officials don’t send him confirmation that the president was born there.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican who is exploring a 2014 race for governor, says he waded into the issue after receiving more than 1,200 emails from people requesting that he verify Obama’s birth in Hawaii before placing the president’s name on the 2012 ballot.

“First of all, I’m not playing to the birthers,” Bennett said in a radio interview with KFYI radio host Mike Broomhead. “I’m not a birther. I believe that the president was born in Hawaii -- or at least I hope he was.”

“But my responsibility as Secretary of State is to make sure that the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballots have met the qualifications for the office that they’re seeking,” he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-arizona-official-wades-into-birther-controversy-its-possible-obama-wont-make-ballot-20120518,0,5463831.story?

CFTC opens probe into JPMorgan trading loss: NYT

Source: Reuters


(Reuters) - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has opened an enforcement case to examine possible wrongdoing at JPMorgan Chase & Co in connection with the bank's multi-billion-dollar trading loss, The New York Times said late on Friday, citing people briefed on the matter.

The CFTC would join the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission among federal agencies examining the loss, which the largest U.S. bank said last week was at least $2 billion.

Members of the CFTC also voted on Friday to publicly disclose the existence of its investigation soon, a rare step it reserves for the most serious cases, the newspaper said.

The CFTC has disclosed an investigation into last October's collapse of MF Global Holdings Ltd, a futures and commodities brokerage from where large sums of customer money remain missing.


Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/19/us-jpmorgan-cftc-idUSBRE84I01B20120519

So do they have one that smells like a barn....?

Some gimmicks are just too irresistible. The Yankee Candle Company, purveyor of scents that you might stumble upon while perusing the shelves of your local pharmacy, has a nifty new idea to enlarge their potential customer base. Man Candles.

Yep, an attention grabber.

“We wanted to develop a collection of scents that men could strongly identify with,” said Hope Margala Klein, a senior vice president, in the company’s press release. The target demographic, as evidenced by the bunch of chilled beers in the background of the promo picture, isn’t very subtle. It appears aimed squarely at the sort of man who presumably might not be enticed by existing Yankee Candle collections like “Summer Love”, “Water Inspirations” or “Citrus Passions”.

That’s all well and good. But wanting to create something that men could “identify with” and something that, you know, someone “would actually want their home to smell like” are two different propositions. These are the scents they’ve come up with:


http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/18/man-candles-for-that-manly-riding-mower-smell/

Tiles May Help Shrink Carbon Footprint by Harnessing Pedestrian Power

This summer at the largest urban mall in Europe, visitors may notice something different at their feet. Twenty bright green rubber tiles will adorn one of the outdoor walkways at the Westfield Stratford City Mall, which abuts the new Olympic stadium in east London.

The squares aren't just ornamental. They are designed to collect the kinetic energy created by the estimated 40 million pedestrians who will use that walkway in a year, generating several hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity from their footsteps. That's enough to power half the mall's outdoor lighting.

The slabs are produced by Pavegen Systems, a London startup launched in 2009 by Laurence Kemball-Cook, a fresh-faced, 26-year-old Londoner who developed his clean energy idea while earning a degree in industrial design and technology at Loughborough University. The 17.7-by-23.6-inch (45-by-60-centimeter) tiles are designed to be used wherever pedestrians congregate en masse: transportation hubs such as including train, subway, and bus stations; airports; schools; malls; bustling shopping avenues. The power generated from millions of footfalls can be used to operate a range of low-power applications, including lighting, signs, digital ads, and Wi-Fi zones.

Nearly 30 permanent and temporary Pavegen projects have been installed in the U.K. and Europe. For two years now, four of its tiles have lined a hallway at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys near Canterbury, capturing energy from footfalls of its 1,100 students to keep the corridor lit. Pavegen has also harnessed music festival attendees' foot-stamping to charge cell phones and power LED lights.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/05/120518-floor-tiles-turn-footfalls-to-electricity/

Solar eclipse: Excitement builds as event nears

Excitement is building over a rare "ring" eclipse that is expected to be visible in California and other parts of the Southwest.

The Griffith Observatory is set to hold a special eclipse-viewing event Sunday, and plans to sell affordable eclipse-viewing glasses and other devices that will project images of the eclipse on the ground. Regular sunglasses will not protect the eyes, said observatory spokeswoman Susan Szotyori.

Telescopes equipped with special filters will also be set up to help the public view the eclipse, officials said.

The best view of the ring eclipse -- which scientists call an "annular" eclipse, in which the moon completely blocks out the sun except for an annulus, or ring of fire, around the moon's edge -- is expected to be on the northern edge of California, coursing near Eureka, Redding, the northern suburbs of Sacramento
and Lake Tahoe.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/solar-eclipse-excitement-builds-as-event-nears.html