The new Dr. Bronner’s 18-in-1 Hemp PEPPERMINT PURE-CASTILE SOAP I got doesn’t look like the old stuff. I have the last little bit of a bottle my mom gave me about 3 years ago, and the color is totally different. Here are some photos:
Organic food is expensive. I decided to look up a few foods I commonly eat to determine which ones are more cost effective.
Organic spinach — $0.80/ounce, 7 calories/ounce = 9 calories/dollar
Organic zucchini (cooked) — 80 calories/pound, $1.99/pound = 40 calories/dollar
Organic carrots (raw) — 175 calories/pound, $1.29/pound = 135 calories/dollar
Organic apple — about 127 calories per apple, at $1.50/pound is $0.74/apple = 172 calories/dollar
Organic yogurt — 680 calories for $3.89 = 175 calories/dollar
Organic eggs — 840 calories for $3.70 = 227 calories/dollar
Organic milk — 1 gallon (2400 calories) for $6 = 400 calories/dollar
Organic peanut butter — 2700 calories for $5 = 540 calories/dollar
Organic beans (dried): 840 calories/pound, $1.39/pound = 600 calories/dollar
Peanut butter and beans are the winners for density. It turns out peanuts are legumes after all, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they are comparable. Greens are like eating water, calorically speaking.
When I was a teenager, I went through some times that felt difficult. I recall during one particular fit of confusion, thinking “if it gets so much that I just can’t take it anymore, I can always go crazy.” Whenever suicide came into my thoughts, I never considered it seriously because I had this idea that I could just go crazy instead.
What did I mean by going crazy? I don’t know if I really knew then, or if I do for sure now. Some things that I saw others around me doing, like “running away” for a week or so to be alone, or at least self-reliant while being among others, seemed like going crazy. Purposefully not living up to the
expectations of others seemed like going crazy. Just letting go of what I believed was reality into what felt like reality, deep down, was crazy.
Nowadays I believe that my old notion of going crazy is not so crazy at all, in fact it’s just another name for being happy. So I work to go crazy every day, and I like to think I’m getting crazier all the time. It’s challenging work, letting go, because it takes time, courage, and this wierd kind of effort
that is sort of the opposite of effort. It’s easy to get wrapped up in trying to go crazy, when by it’s very nature going crazy can not be accomplished through trying, only by letting me be what I am.
Conclusions are for sane people.
Why haven’t I been using this all along? It’s an online travel search engine, kind of like priceline, expedia, and orbitz, but with important differences:
Well, I guess in order to use it I’ll have to decide I want to fly again.
This is a fun video: the story of stuff.
Our current tax structure is not helping anything: we tax income but leave consumption untaxed and pollution not taxed enough. It would certainly reflect my values more, and the values of this video, if we had a consumption tax like the fair tax.
Furthermore, I’m a big fan of hefty taxes for polluters. How else can we get the true cost of stuff to be realized? I’m not as worried about natural resources—they’ll start to cost more as they become scarcer (witness oil). But pollution is a cost that everyone’s paying in terms of health care and quality of life, and I can’t see how the market’s going to figure out the price tag for it. Currently, the market’s price tag is roughly zero as far as I can tell, and it’s because there’s no feasible way of enforcing personal property rights over air and water.
To be fair, I can’t see the government doing a great job with it either—they usually seem more concerned about tending to the symptoms than figuring out what the problem is (witness “stimulus package”, or “health care”). But maybe a stab in the dark in terms of the true price of pollution is better than nothing. If we charge too much, we’ll just have less stuff than we could have otherwise, but we’ll have clean air, and I could certainly live with that. Couldn’t you?
Some family of mine sent me this book recently: Your Future, Your Choice: Christian Character in a Changing Economy, by Kerry J. Koller. It’s short, and covers the basics of how this guy thinks Christians should relate to money and the economy. Much of it was straight forward—don’t have lots of credit card debt, for example. But there were a few interesting ideas that don’t show up in other personal-finance type books.
As I walked to work this week, these guys from American Express were handing out brochures. Something about the things they were saying (”bypass airport security!”) sounded sufficiently confusing to me that I picked up a brochure. It turns out, what they’re pitching is this new Clear Card product.
Our family consumes a lot of cheese. Before I was vegetarian, we used to buy big loafs of cheese from BJs and consume a couple a week. Nowadays, I buy a whole bunch of these tiny little 8oz cheese blocks that cost a fortune. Furthermore, they cost more than most of the other cheeses of the same size, because I’m buying Cabot. Why? Simply because I’m a softie, and the cheese package says this little bit:
Contains no animal rennet.
I like to think of my actions as part of a great vegetarian sneak attack on the cheese industry. Through the power of our consumer demand, we’ll have big loafs of vegetarian cheese yet!
The other month an old friend from high school contacted me via facebook. I hadn’t communicated with her for 8 or 9 years. Anyway, we only messaged once; but I got a chance to look at her profile (and she probably looked at mine). Hers had this interesting bit about how she’s going to Africa to volunteer with her church. Which got me thinking, because this sort of idea is interesting to me.
The following is most of a letter to the editor in a recent issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Penn’s Alumni magazine. It was written in response to an article about health care:
