Daily Archives: October 11, 2017
Powerball and Poultry . . .
Again getting down to Clear Lake, I hit the ground running . . . and printing this morning. The CD/DVD labels had come in, as well as a new Black Ink cartridge for my old HP 2542 printer
Rather than throw away/give away my old HP printer, I took it into work to repurpose it as a product label printer for the many produced-in-house products we have. Besides the DVD’s, they buy many products in bulk and then repackage and label under their own brand.
Since the old IT guy didn’t like to fool with this, they were way behind in labels so I spent the entire day catching up. Really wasn’t difficult since once you make up a basic label for that brand name, it’s just fill in the product and save it off, ready to print more as needed.
Getting home a few minutes after 5pm, Jan and I turned right around and headed back out to meet Debi and Ed Hurlburt at China Delight for dinner.
Jan and I both tried something different tonight. While I got the Black Pepper Beef,
Jan got the Volcano Chicken. (which I didn’t get a photo of)
Really good, but not very spicy. Even the small red peppers weren’t hot at all.
Both ours was supposed to be really, really hot and spicy. But their idea of ‘hot and spicy is apparently completely different than ours. So I added some of my Volcanic Pepper Flakes to spice it up a bit. Or a lot, depending on your taste buds.
Coming home, I made a stop to get a few Powerball lottery tickets. Sine tonight’s drawing is up to $128 Million, I thought it was worth gambling a few bucks.
This Update Just In: I didn’t win. But you already knew that, didn’t you.
Chicago’s Soda Tax that went into effect August 2nd, has, as I predicted, already crashed and burned, and as of today, has been repealed by the City Council, effective December 1st.
But Chicago’s Soda Tax has been through so many iterations, they actually had trouble figuring out which version they were repealing. The first version taxed the distributors who then passed it on to the buyer. But that resulted in a tax on a tax at the retail level, which is illegal under Illinois law.
Their next try was to add the tax at the cash register like sales tax. But the Federal Government quickly told them that they couldn’t tax any food product bought with Federal nutrition benefits, so that took 870,000 people out of the taxing loop, collapsing the expected revenues.
Plus as businesses tried to frantically reprogram their cash register systems to separate out the the purchasers buying with bennies, many of them crashed and burned, leaving customers unable to check out at all.
In addition many people lost their jobs as bottlers cut back due to greatly-lessened demand. and a number of convenience stores near the city limits went under due to people going outside the city to buy soda, and of course while there, buy gas and other stuff they need.
Philadelphia, another city that started taxing sodas in January, really jumped the gun and set up a massive pre-K education system that was to be funded by the soda tax money that was just going to roll in.
But now, 10 months later, they’ve collected less than 25% of the monies expected, leaving them scrambled to find other funds from an already tight budget to the keep the program running. This because they signed long-term leases for buildings, and signed teachers to contracts that they’re now stuck with.
Seems like they forgot the whole thing about numerical calculations with unborn poultry.
The Word of the Day is: Interdigitate
Thought for the Day:
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork. – Edward Abbey
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