Category: General

What happens to expiring milk?

What happens to perishable products (particularly milk) when it hits its expiration date at a grocery store? Do they just throw it out, or do they do find a more worthwhile use for it? This article implies that some expired foods have an afterlife, but I’ve read or heard elsewhere that expired milk is simply thrown out.

Why not buy milk from grocery stores on the morning of its expiration date, and sell it to restaurants, bakeries, and hotels that use large volumes of milk? Since these institutions use large volumes, they could use their daily supply up every day, thus ensuring no spoilage issues. If you could buy expiring milk for 50% off wholesale, and sell it for 75% of normal price, the margins are obvious.

Does anyone already do this? It seems like a simple, environmentally sound business idea. Maybe the logistics costs of gathering just a few gallons at each grocery store make this unworkable. Still, it seems like a reasonable idea… anyone know if this is already done, or why it wouldn’t work?

Posted on by praveenghanta 1

Arctic Sea Ice Gone by 2013?

Summertime Arctic sea ice is indeed vanishing faster than anyone previously predicted, as this graph makes clear. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at UC Boulder concurs, and there is no disputing that 2007 was a record year for Arctic sea ice melt. That doesn’t bode well for future temperature rises, since the ice acts as a giant sun reflector, and helps cool the oceans.

But hey, looking at the bright side, at least the fabled Northwest passage is now open in summertime!

Arctic Sea Ice Trends 1979-2007

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What People Make – Salary Post

A friend of mine asked me to dig up information on salaries in various fields recently. In the US, salary information is jealously guarded, which makes it more difficult for students to weigh their career options. When data is available, it varies in quality, and often shows median salaries, whereas most people are interested in salary data based on data from their peers. I pulled together data below from personal experience and articles I’ve read. Bear in mind that the peer group in mind is those individuals graduating towards the top of their college class, having gone to an elite university, or otherwise possessing similar talent.
Read the full entry (600 words) …

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Top Five Worst Subsidies

Anyone versed in basic economics knows that government subsidies are almost always a bad idea. To be sure, government support can be crucial in furthering basic research and other beneficial activities that for-profit corporations avoid. But it’s a sad reflection of America’s budget process that we continue to subsidize activities that are well established and often highly profitable. In other cases, we taxpayers distort costs through our subsidies, thus encouraging over-consumption of a subsidized good relative to an unsubsidized one.

While many articles on this blog have been devoted to the topic, I couldn’t resist – so here’s my top-five list of most-reviled government subsidies:
Read the full entry (341 words) …

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The Earth is Not Dying

In addition, we cannot cannot destroy the Earth. It’s highly unlikely that humans could even end life on Earth, even if we gave it our best shot (unless Darth Vader loans us a Death Star). Total nuclear holocaust (the simultaneous use of all nuclear weapons on Earth) would lead to the death of most, and perhaps all of humanity, but the Earth would still be around. In perhaps a few decades, and at most a few hundred years, Earth would be teeming with life again. Sure, most of us complex vertebrates would say adios, but give the planet a bit of geologic time, and something equally interesting would probably replace us.Why do I bring this up? With the reemergence of global warming as a major issue in the last few years, alarmists are again making grandiose claims that we’re killing the planet, or that we’re going to destroy life on Earth. Hyperbole may be a way of getting attention (like the title of this post!), but it also tends to discredit an argument. When environmentalists scream that we’re killing the Earth and need to change our ways, what do people do? They tune out.
Read the full entry (308 words) …

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World View

World View

I haven’t posted in quite a while, but thought I’d restart by posting a photo I took on an S-bahn platform in Berlin (Savigny Platz for those keeping score). Interesting to see what folks in other parts of the world think, isn’t it?

In some ways, quite a positive image – if only our politicians got along that well!

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Excellent Analysis of the State of US Healthcare

I’ll digress here from my typical short-essay style to post an excellent series of articles by Dr. Richard Fogoros on the state of US healthcare. Dr. Rich does an excellent job showing how healthcare in the US is primarily government-funded, and how politicians’ inability to confront growing healthcare demand has led to covert healthcare rationing. He goes on to argue that open rationing of public resources is the only long-term approach moving forward, and proposes a system for rationing. The “Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare” is a bombastic title, and the articles are verbose, but Dr. Rich does an excellent job of addressing the topic head-on, and I agree with most of his conclusions.

The Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare, Dr. Richard N. Fogoros, MD

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