Sunday, February 27, 2011

What I'm reading

First, I made this stuffed zucchini recipe last night.  It was all right.  Advice: use fewer white onions, really trust her that you shouldn't use too much tomato or it gets all watery, and add other fun things, like chili peppers and green onions.  Here's what mine looked like: 


Excellent article on the nature of corporations, with examples from his job in a supermarket bakery:

When things change in corporations, as far as you and I are concerned, they always change for the worse, not for the better. Everything gets cheaper, thinner, smaller, lousier, shittier.
Quality is NOT Job One.
Job One is MAKE MONEY. Do anything, ANYTHING, to increase the bottom line, improve profits, reap from your customer base the absolute maximum number of dollars you can reap.
Which means: Always, always, always tweak the system, find ways to cut down on the cost of every little thing, find ways to squeeze a teeny bit more labor out of your workers, find ways to trim the product by a tiny percentage point or two, but always so that your customers won’t notice.
Which also means: Always, always, always tweak the system by honey-fuggling with the local government, the official regulatory bodies, the oversight institutions, so that you can get away with as little as humanly possible in the areas of health, safety, sanitation, product wholesomeness, and everything else you can think of.

Another response to Mark Bittman's article that I wrote about the other day.

A blog post about how gender-based privilege doesn't exist
Feminism got itself into a dead-end when it chose to analyze the workings of patriarchy in terms of gender privilege. Only when we recognize that patriarchy benefits both men and women while at the same time causing great harm to both men and women, will we be able to move ahead. This is a system that has existed for such a long time because it offers huge rewards to people whom it oppresses. It's time we stopped all senseless blabber about privilege and started recognizing that.
It's an interesting topic, which we've discussed over here quite a bit, if you can get past the fact that this feminist seems to really hate other women. 

Here is a long article that I haven't completely read yet, but am sure I will like it when I'm finished.  It's about greedy fuckers and making them pay their fucking taxes, goddamnit.  And how Americans let corporations get away with everything, and how stupid that is, and how the Brits do it better.  Well, that's what the first 1/3 of the first page is about, anyway: 
Instead of the fake populism of the Tea Party, there is a movement based on real populism. It shows that there is an alternative to making the poor and the middle class pay for a crisis caused by the rich. It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.
Warren's Oscar picks;  

OH HEY, did you know that someone's trying to help Nathan Fillion actually buy Firefly?  If it's his, he plans to distribute it for free on the internet.  That's pretty neat.

Ten more disastrous things coming out of Wisconsin's newly-elected GOP.

 And here is a cute video explaining Instant Runoff, or Ranked Choice, Voting: