This was originally composed as a response to someone's question in an email, but I thought it might as well get posted for general consumption.
Carbs in the diet - nearly all of them - cause elevated levels of insulin in your blood, even when the carbs are consumed in what would seem like small quantities. A single slice of bread spikes the insulin level in the blood for as much as several hours at a time. Recognizing the importance of this insulin spike is the fundamental key to understanding the problems that cause overweight, diabetes, and many other things.
Any carbs that convert to glucose in the digestive tract (which is most of them) contribute to the problem. Bread, potatoes, honey and table sugar all have nearly identical effects on insulin levels, as do many other things, including "whole grain" breads, rice, granola, and even dried beans. Certain carbs, like fructose, don't elevate insulin, but fructose has its own ill effects. For a while, it was believed that a diet that was high in "fiber" would ameliorate the effects of the carbs, but the research that was done in an attempt to demonstrate this ended up proving that fiber, while inoffensive, is also powerless to make a positive difference in the face of high levels of the problem carbs. (Fiber, basically, is a form of carb that the body doesn't convert to glucose or fructose, and which doesn't cause problems at all as a result.)
So with carb consumption comes elevated insulin. Oddly enough, insulin in the blood tends to make you hungry; that effect is a big part of the reason why the old saying "hunger is the best sauce" fits so well; as you start to eat carbs, your hunger actually increases because of the rising insulin. This can become a vicious cycle very easily; you eat something with carbs in it, the blood sugar rises, the insulin rises, the sugar level declines - but the insulin level doesn't fall for a while yet; now you're really hungry even though it hasn't been very long since you ate. (You've heard of the "sugar crash"? This is the simplified version of the biochemistry behind it.) So you eat again - probably including more carbs, because they're everywhere. Spike - crash - spike - crash. Getting the idea that this might not be healthy? You'd be right - and as the guy in the infomercials would say, that's not all...
An elevated level of insulin in the blood makes your system unable to use fats as fuel; it puts the muscles and most other fuel-using parts of the body into "burn only sugar, and not fat" mode, and at the same time it puts the fat cells into "grab all the fat that comes by and stash it" mode. And because the liver will try its best to help speed this along by converting that sugar to fat (in the form of triglycerides), the elevated insulin can cause a lot of fat accumulation. If you don't eat again for quite a while, that stored fat can get used up pretty much right away, if everything is normal. After all, when insulin is very low or absent, fats are continuously released from storage for use as fuel. But when insulin is present in the quantities that are common in most of the US population for most of any 24 hour cycle, that doesn't get a chance to happen; for most or all of the day, fats are only stored, and sugars get converted to fats - and stored. This is the basic reason that people get fat on a typical American diet; even long after they go to bed at night, the insulin level doesn't drop back to the point where they can use what they've been storing. But that's not the worst...
Chronic elevated insulin (a condition that is now pandemic in much of the world, and worse in the US than in most other nations) eventually results in hyperinsulinemia, a condition in which the insulin level is elevated well above normal whenever any carbs are present in the diet; if continued too long, eventually the body's ability to cope with that insulin - and respond to it - fails, resulting in diabetes. The whole process can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years, sometimes longer, depending upon the individual. (Some people may never develop it, but that doesn't mean that they won't show the ill effects of a carb-laden diet.) And sure enough, the diabetes epidemic in the US got worse starting about 10 years after the FDA and USDA published their high-carb-based nutritional recommendations in the early to mid '70s, which really launched the era of the high-carb low-fat mania.
So carbs cause insulin to get raised; what drops it? Well, excess insulin in the blood is removed by a substance called Insulin Degrading Enzyme. But in hyperinsulinemia, the production of the enzyme just can't keep up with the need to clear the excess insulin from the bloodstream. Even in people who haven't developed hyperinsulinemia, it's easy for the level of the enzyme to be just barely adequate to clear the excess insulin, if they're eating a lot of carbs. That's bad, because ordinarily, the excess amounts of that enzyme will switch roles and act to "clean up" various things, like the deposits that are believed to contribute to the formation of the plaques found in Alzheimer's patients. Like most things in the body (insulin included), that enzyme serves multiple purposes - and it's needed for all of them. When the supply gets used up by an overloaded demand in one area, the rest get neglected. Things get unbalanced. That's bad.
So, long-term high levels of insulin lead to hyperinsulinemia, and that clobbers the body's clean-up enzyme that would be doing a lot more than cope with the insulin if it could. And hyperinsulinemia leads to diabetes. Presumably you know about the plethora of ills that go with diabetes; nerve damage in the extremities, obesity, heart disease, atherosclerosis and more. Worth avoiding, wouldn't you say?
For quite a while, diabetics were advised to substitute fructose for the regular sugar in their diet. But that turns out to have been a bad idea. Fructose (which is one of the two sugars that are produced when table sugar breaks down) has been strongly implicated as a major contributor to (if not the principle cause of) elevated levels of bad cholesterol, which further contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In the diet, it stresses the liver, where it is converted into triglycerides. It is also directly suspected as a contributing factor in the buildup of the plaques which are present in Alzheimer's patients, through the formation of what is known as advanced glycation end-products. (That's part of what the insulin-degrading enzyme is needed to help clean up - another vicious cycle.)
So fructose is a bad actor, and table sugar is 50% fructose. But it's not the only source for most people in the US; it is present in higher-than-table-sugar levels in high fructose corn syrup, which is a government-subsidized substance used in nearly all non-diet soft drinks, most mass-produced baked goods, most pancake and waffle syrup, and even things like ketchup and relish. Outside of table sugar, HFCS and honey, fructose is fairly rare in a diet that does not include those three sources; it is found only in small quantities in most raw fruits, but the presence of significant glucose along with the fructose makes the majority of fruits (and nearly all juices) problematic in any event. (I have mused that if Genesis had been written by someone in possession of all the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat fruits of any kind, for they will make you ill in old age.")
In the absence of carbs, the body's ability to deal with large amounts of fat in the diet is prodigious for most people. Fat clearly is what we handle best and easiest as caloric fuel, with protein being second - and protein is essential. Carbs, however, are absolutely not essential at all, as long as there's enough fat and protein available. And most people simply will not over-eat when their diet is composed entirely of non-carb foods with adequate fat. The insulin response that drives their hunger vanishes, and they'll eat only what they need.
By the way, saturated fat is NOT a problem. No study has ever proven that elevated consumption of saturated fat causes elevated levels of triglycerides or bad cholesterol. The non-natural stuff known as "trans fat", however, most certainly is a problem in both areas.
This really just scratches the surface; the body of knowledge that condemns carbs has been accumulating in various disconnected fields of biology and branches of medicine and chemistry for a century or more, but most of the research results have remained uncollected and uncorrelated until recently. One of the people who connected the dots is Gary Taubes, an author I have mentioned before. Many people had pieces of the puzzle, but because the fields where the research was done have grown so specialized, few of them had the rest of the picture...and while it's true that certain people have been aware of the truth about the gross effects of carbs and fats in the diet, their observations haven't been taken seriously by the medical establishment most of the time, often because they were mere clinicians who had been getting results, not respected researchers who had hundred-million-dollar grants funding their investigations. For over 50 years, the research money has been directed solely into trying to prove that fats and overeating are the problem behind obesity, largely as a result of the efforts of a few highly-placed "authorities" who gained stature after World War II without any real research to back up their conviction and their assertion that overeating and overconsumption of fats were the exclusive causes of obesity and other health issues. And, of course, it doesn't help that much of the nutritional "research" has been funded by companies like General Mills, whose revenue derives almost entirely from the sale of grain-based foods; is it any surprise that the studies seldom have been structured in a way that could implicate carbs via their results? I don't think so.
So, what to do?
Four words not mentioned before: Meat is your friend. While it's possible to eat a largely-vegetable diet that includes enough protein and fat, it's much easier to eat healthy when meat is the primary ingredient in the diet - and don't trim those steaks so close. For vegetarians, guacamole is your friend, but it's not enough by itself. (And if you eat meat, you can now revel in the fact that the cheaper ground beef has more fat in it.)
My typical breakfast: Three eggs with 4 ounces of sausage and three strips of bacon, fried in the bacon grease. All told, that's over 100 grams of fat. By the old USDA standards, I'm getting an overload of fat and cholesterol for the day in just that one meal. Lunch and dinner look similar, though they actually tend to be smaller a lot of the time because with no carbs to drive the hunger, I'm not ravenous when I sit down to eat. By the "conventional wisdom" of the '80s, that kind of diet is horribly unhealthy, and I should look like a grounded blimp. Funny thing; my blood pressure and my weight are both down relative to where they were when I was eating lots of carbs. And everyone I know who has followed this path reports the same results; one of them simply says "Bread is deadly. Don't eat anything white." (Not 100% reliable; jicama is very low-carb, and white - and tasty.)
Just remember; if you want the benefits to last, going low-carb isn't a diet, it's a permanent lifestyle. Don't think of it as a way to lose weight, think of it as a way to lose health problems.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
BSOD is no fun.
This is mostly be way of reinforcing something for myself; after sitting mostly unused for 6 months, I fired up one of the XP laptops (an older Dell D600) only to discover that it was jumping to a Blue Screen Of Death after just a minute or two of operation. The exact error message was complaining of the infamous IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL condition, and the c4 parameter was consistent at 0x80502207 continually. Disabling various hardware, swapping the memory from a different (trouble-free, identical) system, and reseating various connectors had no effect; the problem followed the hard drive into the other laptop as well, which pretty well nailed it down as a software issue.
Since there hadn't been any recent new software installs made (though upgrades may have happened silently), I concluded that the easiest likely path to a fix was using the Repair feature on the Windows install disc; fortunately, I had one of those for this machine. Running it, however, did not completely solve the issue, but it rendered the problem somewhat more tractable. After a bit of headscratching, I uninstalled the known-to-often-be-problematic Adobe Flash plugin, and the problem vanished completely. I don't know if the Flash version present was one of the troublesome recent versions that Firefox immediately warns against if they are detected when the FF installer fetches the update, but that seems likely.
Anyway, now I've got it written down where I can find the note next time. And so can you. I hope it helps.
Since there hadn't been any recent new software installs made (though upgrades may have happened silently), I concluded that the easiest likely path to a fix was using the Repair feature on the Windows install disc; fortunately, I had one of those for this machine. Running it, however, did not completely solve the issue, but it rendered the problem somewhat more tractable. After a bit of headscratching, I uninstalled the known-to-often-be-problematic Adobe Flash plugin, and the problem vanished completely. I don't know if the Flash version present was one of the troublesome recent versions that Firefox immediately warns against if they are detected when the FF installer fetches the update, but that seems likely.
Anyway, now I've got it written down where I can find the note next time. And so can you. I hope it helps.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
On the perils of paying attention when driving.
Now ordinarily, paying close attention to what's around you is a Good Thing while driving, but this past weekend, some might say that I carried it a bit too far. On the way home from my daughter's apartment, I spotted a little ball of fluff cowering next to the wheel of a car parked on a street in her neighborhood. A kitten-sized ball of fluff. And in passing, it looked like it was, indeed, a very small kitten. So I turned around, and went back.
My daughter got out and checked; the kitten was alive, not apparently injured, but obviously hungry and cold (The temp was around 42F at the time.) It was also very obviously fully socialized to people; it didn't try to run away when she approached it. The people standing around a vehicle across the street stated that the kitten had been dumped, but they were vague about when. They were, however, emphatic about our being welcome to take it, and that they wanted none of it. (I wasn't surprised about the latter; the cultural bias against cats is strong in most Hispanic neighborhoods.) The kitten had a green collar with a bell, but was a bit disheveled and not in the best of shape.
Now, a lot of people would have been able to leave the little critter there. Fortunately for the kitten, and unfortunately for us, I wasn't one of them. So we brought it home and installed it in the usual isolation ward; the front bathroom. Given food (inhaled), water (ditto) and warmth, its demeanor improved immediately. But it was quite apparent that it had fleas, it was sneezing, and one eye was watering. (All of its whiskers on the same side as the watering eye also showed signs of either singeing or breakage; we're still not sure what caused that.) So we took it to the vet on Monday.
As expected, it had the usual suite of outdoor-kitten parasites plus one that we've not previously had to deal with, but at least it didn't have ringworm; meds were issued, and instructions received. Three days later, the sniffles have abated quite a bit, the kitten has developed the "I'm well fed" bulge, and it's even more demanding of cuddles than when we found it. It has shown a remarkable ability to ignore the pro-forma you're-a-stranger hisses of the other three cats, and finds the rest of the house intriguing on those occasions when we bring it out for a supervised foray.
We're pretty sure that it's got some Turkish Van in its heritage, based on the markings and the consistency of the fur; we haven't tested to see what it thinks of water yet, though that will happen at some point. We're also pretty sure, based on the timing of when it was dumped, and the fact that it had that new, bright-green collar with a bell, that this kitten was most likely a Christmas present to a child whose parents were not on board when the decision was made, and who then vetoed the gift retroactively, probably telling the kid that the kitten "ran away". They probably congratulated themselves for not having taken it to an animal shelter (where, in truth, it would not have been likely to live long), and for having instead just dumped it... in a neighborhood where its likelihood of finding a receptive new family was small.
And, of course, there's also the fact that if the postulated scenario is correct, then they lied to the kid, too.
That's all speculation, of course, but it's speculation based on decades of direct observation; I've seen this play out too often. One of our other cats came to us under similar circumstances (dumped on a neighbor's doorstep on Easter morning), so the unwelcome-holiday-gift factor is one we've seen before.
This one doesn't have a name yet, but the chances are good that it's going to end up staying with us. This is not what we'd planned, but with as much as we'll have invested in her, we're going to insist on some pretty specific requirements for anyone who's going to adopt, so we'll probably end up with our fourth.
Worse things have happened.
My daughter got out and checked; the kitten was alive, not apparently injured, but obviously hungry and cold (The temp was around 42F at the time.) It was also very obviously fully socialized to people; it didn't try to run away when she approached it. The people standing around a vehicle across the street stated that the kitten had been dumped, but they were vague about when. They were, however, emphatic about our being welcome to take it, and that they wanted none of it. (I wasn't surprised about the latter; the cultural bias against cats is strong in most Hispanic neighborhoods.) The kitten had a green collar with a bell, but was a bit disheveled and not in the best of shape.
Now, a lot of people would have been able to leave the little critter there. Fortunately for the kitten, and unfortunately for us, I wasn't one of them. So we brought it home and installed it in the usual isolation ward; the front bathroom. Given food (inhaled), water (ditto) and warmth, its demeanor improved immediately. But it was quite apparent that it had fleas, it was sneezing, and one eye was watering. (All of its whiskers on the same side as the watering eye also showed signs of either singeing or breakage; we're still not sure what caused that.) So we took it to the vet on Monday.
As expected, it had the usual suite of outdoor-kitten parasites plus one that we've not previously had to deal with, but at least it didn't have ringworm; meds were issued, and instructions received. Three days later, the sniffles have abated quite a bit, the kitten has developed the "I'm well fed" bulge, and it's even more demanding of cuddles than when we found it. It has shown a remarkable ability to ignore the pro-forma you're-a-stranger hisses of the other three cats, and finds the rest of the house intriguing on those occasions when we bring it out for a supervised foray.
We're pretty sure that it's got some Turkish Van in its heritage, based on the markings and the consistency of the fur; we haven't tested to see what it thinks of water yet, though that will happen at some point. We're also pretty sure, based on the timing of when it was dumped, and the fact that it had that new, bright-green collar with a bell, that this kitten was most likely a Christmas present to a child whose parents were not on board when the decision was made, and who then vetoed the gift retroactively, probably telling the kid that the kitten "ran away". They probably congratulated themselves for not having taken it to an animal shelter (where, in truth, it would not have been likely to live long), and for having instead just dumped it... in a neighborhood where its likelihood of finding a receptive new family was small.
And, of course, there's also the fact that if the postulated scenario is correct, then they lied to the kid, too.
That's all speculation, of course, but it's speculation based on decades of direct observation; I've seen this play out too often. One of our other cats came to us under similar circumstances (dumped on a neighbor's doorstep on Easter morning), so the unwelcome-holiday-gift factor is one we've seen before.
This one doesn't have a name yet, but the chances are good that it's going to end up staying with us. This is not what we'd planned, but with as much as we'll have invested in her, we're going to insist on some pretty specific requirements for anyone who's going to adopt, so we'll probably end up with our fourth.
Worse things have happened.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Welcome to the New Feudalism
If you have any doubt that the very rich have decided to do away with the relevance of the middle class, you need look no farther than the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 and the current S510 bill in Congress.
The former effectively made it illegal for any individual or small-scale manufacturer to produce anything for sale for use by children, through demanding such absurd testing that no small producer can possibly afford to meet the requirements - and ANY breach allows the producer to be hauled into civil court and slapped with a million dollar fine. It applies to anything sold for use by children, including books, and it makes no exception for used, hand-made, or unique items. It has been used already to shut down thrift stores - places that sell NOTHING new! - in my own state. I have ceased to offer to produce anything in my own shop that is not in adult sizes, and many others in my position have done likewise. Do you really think that having only suppliers of the size of Wal-Mart will make your children safer?
It gets worse...
S510, which has not yet passed but shows signs of getting to the President's desk too soon, effectively makes it illegal (through grossly impractical or factually impossible paperwork requirements) for local small farmers to sell anything direct to the consumer, or sell it at all in most cases; it will also severely degrade the quality of produce available to restaurants, many of which rely on nearby small farms to obtain supplies of the quality of vegetables that you just can't get any other way. It takes the current privilege-of-monetary-power of hyper-abusive giants like Monsanto, to run roughshod over the production end, and enshrines those unconscionable practices as rights under the law; in some cases, it enlists the government itself in visiting those abuses upon the farmers. And it denies access to the market to any who dare try to simply continue the old, traditional ways of food production that have served humanity well for millennia.
Many links are out there about this; here's just one: http://hartkeisonline.com/food-politics/s510-may-mean-10-years-in-prison-for-farmers/
If this passes, it can be fairly said that we no longer have a government of, by or for the people; it will have passed to a tyrannic rule of the corporations and moneyed few, and will remain so unless WE get off our collective asses and vote in some people who have the integrity and unpurchasability to restore the government's true role as the protector of the RIGHTS of the people. This is NOT the goal of the Tea Party, whose dupes of the rich are simply seeking to dismantle the only remaining mechanism that might have a chance of being reformed to serve us again - the government itself. This is NOT the goal of the Republican Party, which is funded by those same corporations and moneyed few. This is also, sadly, NOT the goal of the current Democratic administration, which has utterly failed to meet any of the reasonable expectations that came from its win in 2008. But I see no party other than the Democrats which might be possible to direct toward this end; the Tea Party makes a joke of itself at every turn, and the Republicans...are Republicans, dedicated to precisely the opposite goal from what is needed.
Postscript: The Tester Amendment to S510 exempts only the smallest farms - those with a gross revenue of under $500,000 per year, who are no threat to Big Farma - from the documentation requirements of the bill and from some of the USDA-backed meddling in their operational practices which results from it. This does not really change the impact of the bill very much; although the kind of semi-pro small-scale farmer who sells direct to the public at a small-scale farmer's market in the town square would probably be exempt, the kind of farmer that's running an operation large enough to reliably supply a dozen restaurants with fresh vegetables, eggs and other products would almost certainly fall under the regs - and probably succumb. It's fair to say that the *average* family farmer is still directly under threat from this bill, and it is certain that the bill does more to erode the overall long-term safety of the food stream than to bolster it; the idea that forcing agriculture to be done only via the methods used by the largest industrial farms (where quality control is nothing more than a very bad joke, and the only thing that matters is the appearance and quantity of product that goes out the gate) is what needs to be struck down, and that basically means that this bill needs to be soundly defeated. Just look at who's really supporting S510; the same Big Farma outfits that essentially created it. This is a case of the fox demanding that only foxes be allowed to guard a henhouse, folks. It's NOT good for any of us. If you think letting the huge agribusinesses run the show is a good idea, think back to the last time you bought one of those huge, perfect-looking peaches in late summer...and it turned out to be lovely on the outside, and tasteless (and often half-rotten) on the inside. That's the kind of food that comes from following USDA "Best Practices", and NO farmer should be forced to follow them!
The former effectively made it illegal for any individual or small-scale manufacturer to produce anything for sale for use by children, through demanding such absurd testing that no small producer can possibly afford to meet the requirements - and ANY breach allows the producer to be hauled into civil court and slapped with a million dollar fine. It applies to anything sold for use by children, including books, and it makes no exception for used, hand-made, or unique items. It has been used already to shut down thrift stores - places that sell NOTHING new! - in my own state. I have ceased to offer to produce anything in my own shop that is not in adult sizes, and many others in my position have done likewise. Do you really think that having only suppliers of the size of Wal-Mart will make your children safer?
It gets worse...
S510, which has not yet passed but shows signs of getting to the President's desk too soon, effectively makes it illegal (through grossly impractical or factually impossible paperwork requirements) for local small farmers to sell anything direct to the consumer, or sell it at all in most cases; it will also severely degrade the quality of produce available to restaurants, many of which rely on nearby small farms to obtain supplies of the quality of vegetables that you just can't get any other way. It takes the current privilege-of-monetary-power of hyper-abusive giants like Monsanto, to run roughshod over the production end, and enshrines those unconscionable practices as rights under the law; in some cases, it enlists the government itself in visiting those abuses upon the farmers. And it denies access to the market to any who dare try to simply continue the old, traditional ways of food production that have served humanity well for millennia.
Many links are out there about this; here's just one: http://hartkeisonline.com/food-politics/s510-may-mean-10-years-in-prison-for-farmers/
If this passes, it can be fairly said that we no longer have a government of, by or for the people; it will have passed to a tyrannic rule of the corporations and moneyed few, and will remain so unless WE get off our collective asses and vote in some people who have the integrity and unpurchasability to restore the government's true role as the protector of the RIGHTS of the people. This is NOT the goal of the Tea Party, whose dupes of the rich are simply seeking to dismantle the only remaining mechanism that might have a chance of being reformed to serve us again - the government itself. This is NOT the goal of the Republican Party, which is funded by those same corporations and moneyed few. This is also, sadly, NOT the goal of the current Democratic administration, which has utterly failed to meet any of the reasonable expectations that came from its win in 2008. But I see no party other than the Democrats which might be possible to direct toward this end; the Tea Party makes a joke of itself at every turn, and the Republicans...are Republicans, dedicated to precisely the opposite goal from what is needed.
Postscript: The Tester Amendment to S510 exempts only the smallest farms - those with a gross revenue of under $500,000 per year, who are no threat to Big Farma - from the documentation requirements of the bill and from some of the USDA-backed meddling in their operational practices which results from it. This does not really change the impact of the bill very much; although the kind of semi-pro small-scale farmer who sells direct to the public at a small-scale farmer's market in the town square would probably be exempt, the kind of farmer that's running an operation large enough to reliably supply a dozen restaurants with fresh vegetables, eggs and other products would almost certainly fall under the regs - and probably succumb. It's fair to say that the *average* family farmer is still directly under threat from this bill, and it is certain that the bill does more to erode the overall long-term safety of the food stream than to bolster it; the idea that forcing agriculture to be done only via the methods used by the largest industrial farms (where quality control is nothing more than a very bad joke, and the only thing that matters is the appearance and quantity of product that goes out the gate) is what needs to be struck down, and that basically means that this bill needs to be soundly defeated. Just look at who's really supporting S510; the same Big Farma outfits that essentially created it. This is a case of the fox demanding that only foxes be allowed to guard a henhouse, folks. It's NOT good for any of us. If you think letting the huge agribusinesses run the show is a good idea, think back to the last time you bought one of those huge, perfect-looking peaches in late summer...and it turned out to be lovely on the outside, and tasteless (and often half-rotten) on the inside. That's the kind of food that comes from following USDA "Best Practices", and NO farmer should be forced to follow them!
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
That's not an auction.
Lots of people will not have run across this particular scam, so I think it's worthwhile blowing a whistle here. A large number of sites have popped up with what they claim is an "auction" service; biddi.com, quibids.com, swoopo.com... the list is much too long already, and keeps getting longer. They all share one essential characteristic, however: they are NOT auctions.
In a real auction, the bidder selects the amount that they wish to pay, and bids it explicitly; when the highest bid has been posted (as indicated by the fact that no higher bid comes in), then the auction ends and the item is sold for that amount, which represents the bidder's entire outlay (possibly plus an auctioneer's fee that is fixed and knowable before the bidding begins). But the so-called "auctions" on these sites just increment the "price" by a fixed amount for each "bid", so the bidder never has the option of simply placing his bid for the amount he'd be willing to pay, and being done with it... and the advertised final "auction price" of any given item does not include the amount that the winning bidder had to spend on "bids" in order to be that eventual last bidder, so the "price" is fictitious in fact.
In these competitions, the "bidders" drop out only due to exhaustion of patience or money to buy more "bids" (possibly after they've spent a ludicrous amount fruitlessly), not due to the auction's "price" having exceeded their limits... though dropping out may very well cost them every bit as much as they'd have bid or more, without producing a win as a result! That's because of the second striking difference between these sites and actual auctions; even if an actual auction requires a cash deposit prior to participation (which is very, very rare), there is never a fee for placing a bid. On these "penny auction" sites, every bid requires payment of a fee. So "bids" aren't free, and "bids" are not actual BIDS, they are just tokens; places in line. And that brings me to the next point: These are more like a lottery, in that you have to buy bid packs (like jar-drawing tickets), but they differ from a jar drawing in that the last ticket dropped in the jar is ALWAYS the winner.
Do you see the problem yet? Perhaps it will become clear with the addition of one more detail. During the final countdown period of these "auctions", if a "bid" comes in, the countdown timer resets to a fixed value (typically 20 seconds) and restarts. This means that you CANNOT just wait until the timer is at 1 second, and try to flip your bid in last; others will ALWAYS have the option of being last "bidder", because your "last" bid will give them more time to flip another one in.
I looked at the bids on several of these sites, and it became obvious that the site owners are making a huge profit, with what amounts to a lie. They may say that (for instance) an $800 Canon digital camera went for $43 (in a process where each "bid" increased the price by just one cent), but what they aren't saying is that the actual amount that the "winning bidder" paid in order to "win" is higher - probably MUCH higher. To place the bids at all, the bidder had to buy "bids" - probably lots of them - and may have spent hundreds of dollars more on "bids" than on the final "price" of the item. In order to wear out the competition and take that final-bid spot, a lot of other folks had to drop out along the way; they, too, may have already spent quite a lot on "bids". In the Canon camera example, if bids cost 50 cents each (not unusual; some sites require more, some less) and there were 4300 "bids", the site received $2,193 for that $800 camera: 50 cents for each "bid", plus the $43 that the "winner" still had to pay to complete the transaction. Oh, and unless the other bidders were given the option of converting their bids to cash against the purchase of the same item as a "buy it now" deal, they got NOTHING, despite having put over a thousand extra dollars into the site's coffers.
Also, consider the time factor. If that Canon camera required 4300 "bids" to be "sold", and all but 150 of them were placed during that seemingly-endless "final 20 seconds" at the rate of one every 10 seconds (which isn't far off, based on my observations), then that "final 20 seconds" lasted a whopping ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS.
So, what amounts to a rigged raffle is being passed off as an auction. Unless the Buy It Now price is really attractive to you (and you had best read the fine print about shipping charges and other fees first... if you can find them!), these "auctions" offer you only a way to lose substantial sums of money and time.
I call them a scam, pure and simple. And I suspect that they probably violate both the auction and lottery statutes of multiple jurisdictions, but I haven't seen anything being done about them by the legal system so far.
In a real auction, the bidder selects the amount that they wish to pay, and bids it explicitly; when the highest bid has been posted (as indicated by the fact that no higher bid comes in), then the auction ends and the item is sold for that amount, which represents the bidder's entire outlay (possibly plus an auctioneer's fee that is fixed and knowable before the bidding begins). But the so-called "auctions" on these sites just increment the "price" by a fixed amount for each "bid", so the bidder never has the option of simply placing his bid for the amount he'd be willing to pay, and being done with it... and the advertised final "auction price" of any given item does not include the amount that the winning bidder had to spend on "bids" in order to be that eventual last bidder, so the "price" is fictitious in fact.
In these competitions, the "bidders" drop out only due to exhaustion of patience or money to buy more "bids" (possibly after they've spent a ludicrous amount fruitlessly), not due to the auction's "price" having exceeded their limits... though dropping out may very well cost them every bit as much as they'd have bid or more, without producing a win as a result! That's because of the second striking difference between these sites and actual auctions; even if an actual auction requires a cash deposit prior to participation (which is very, very rare), there is never a fee for placing a bid. On these "penny auction" sites, every bid requires payment of a fee. So "bids" aren't free, and "bids" are not actual BIDS, they are just tokens; places in line. And that brings me to the next point: These are more like a lottery, in that you have to buy bid packs (like jar-drawing tickets), but they differ from a jar drawing in that the last ticket dropped in the jar is ALWAYS the winner.
Do you see the problem yet? Perhaps it will become clear with the addition of one more detail. During the final countdown period of these "auctions", if a "bid" comes in, the countdown timer resets to a fixed value (typically 20 seconds) and restarts. This means that you CANNOT just wait until the timer is at 1 second, and try to flip your bid in last; others will ALWAYS have the option of being last "bidder", because your "last" bid will give them more time to flip another one in.
I looked at the bids on several of these sites, and it became obvious that the site owners are making a huge profit, with what amounts to a lie. They may say that (for instance) an $800 Canon digital camera went for $43 (in a process where each "bid" increased the price by just one cent), but what they aren't saying is that the actual amount that the "winning bidder" paid in order to "win" is higher - probably MUCH higher. To place the bids at all, the bidder had to buy "bids" - probably lots of them - and may have spent hundreds of dollars more on "bids" than on the final "price" of the item. In order to wear out the competition and take that final-bid spot, a lot of other folks had to drop out along the way; they, too, may have already spent quite a lot on "bids". In the Canon camera example, if bids cost 50 cents each (not unusual; some sites require more, some less) and there were 4300 "bids", the site received $2,193 for that $800 camera: 50 cents for each "bid", plus the $43 that the "winner" still had to pay to complete the transaction. Oh, and unless the other bidders were given the option of converting their bids to cash against the purchase of the same item as a "buy it now" deal, they got NOTHING, despite having put over a thousand extra dollars into the site's coffers.
Also, consider the time factor. If that Canon camera required 4300 "bids" to be "sold", and all but 150 of them were placed during that seemingly-endless "final 20 seconds" at the rate of one every 10 seconds (which isn't far off, based on my observations), then that "final 20 seconds" lasted a whopping ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS.
So, what amounts to a rigged raffle is being passed off as an auction. Unless the Buy It Now price is really attractive to you (and you had best read the fine print about shipping charges and other fees first... if you can find them!), these "auctions" offer you only a way to lose substantial sums of money and time.
I call them a scam, pure and simple. And I suspect that they probably violate both the auction and lottery statutes of multiple jurisdictions, but I haven't seen anything being done about them by the legal system so far.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Inkjet, Laser, or FedEx Office?
Getting your document (or webpage, or whatever) printed out attractively on paper seems, intuitively, like it should be one of the cheaper things that you can do with your computer. And for some people, it is. But there are some interesting and/or infuriating exceptions.
The inkjet printer market used to be dominated by models that shared a common design feature; the widgetry that actually sprayed the ink was built into the replaceable ink cartridge. On the one hand, this meant that if everything worked as designed, the most crucial working parts wouldn't clog, and you'd never have to worry about their wearing out. On the other hand, the cost of replacing them with every cartridge change was much higher than for just tanks of ink. To make matters worse, those early printers often didn't work as designed, and often had to have the cleaning cycle run several times if the last page printed was more than a day previous. Since each cleaning cycle discarded a bunch of ink, it could easily mean that an infrequently-used early inkjet could have a per-sheet cost of printing that exceeded 50 cents per page. (In one particularly memorable case for me, an HP 855c managed to have a per-page cost of over $5 per properly-printed full-color-output page over the three years I had it. I still use their lasers, but I don't buy their inkjets at all.)
Later versions of inkjets arrived on the market using just a replaceable ink tank; the better ones used individual tanks for each color. Although the cost of the ink remained high, the per-page printing cost was reduced...and if generic ink tanks were available, the cost could drop to under a penny a page. To reduce the competition from generic ink, the printer manufacturers switched to ink tanks with a small, inexpensive (but proprietary) chip in the end; without the chip, the printer failed to recognize the tank's presence, and often wouldn't work at all. If that chip was actually measuring the ink usage instead of just keeping a theoretical tally of it, this might have been laudable...but in reality, the chips tend to tell the printer that replacement is required even though there's still plenty of ink left. And as before, each cleaning cycle uses up a bunch of extra ink. Individual chipped tanks can cost $60 for a set, and may last for as few as 30 pages or as many as 1200, depending on what's being printed and how often the printer is used. For people who print things multiple times per day, every day of the week, the newer inkjets usually aren't a bad deal...but if you often go for days at a time without generating any hardcopy, even these later inkjets can be much too expensive to operate.
Laser printers, on the other hand, have a cost per sheet that's pretty much determined by how much toner is used for each page. Text doesn't use much, and typical lasers can print a page for at most a few cents. Laser cartridges don't remain functional forever, even if they still have plenty of toner left; the user who prints just a single page infrequently may still find that in the long run, a laser's output isn't really cost-effective.
On the other hand, if there's a FedEx Office store nearby, one additional option is to just ditch the whole printer-ownership thing, and upload documents to their printer. The per-page cost still isn't cheap, and you really need to carefully preview what's going to be produced, but it has the distinct advantage of not requiring space on your desk, and not requiring that you keep consumables around that, in the case of inkjets in particular, end up getting wasted more than used.
My recommendations:
For daily, heavy use, if color output isn't needed, get a laser.
For daily, heavy use, if color is needed, get an inkjet that uses separate tanks.
For daily, moderate use, both inkjets and lasers are suitable.
For daily, light use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For less frequent use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For occasional use, abandon trying to have color output, and get a laser...or just print out your hardcopy at a nearby FedEx Office if that's a viable option. (You may spend less, even in the long run, than you would by buying a "cheap" printer.)
Color lasers have a high per-page cost regardless of how much they're used; unless you need their specific qualities, I can't say that I would recommend them at all.
There you have it. Kill some trees.
The inkjet printer market used to be dominated by models that shared a common design feature; the widgetry that actually sprayed the ink was built into the replaceable ink cartridge. On the one hand, this meant that if everything worked as designed, the most crucial working parts wouldn't clog, and you'd never have to worry about their wearing out. On the other hand, the cost of replacing them with every cartridge change was much higher than for just tanks of ink. To make matters worse, those early printers often didn't work as designed, and often had to have the cleaning cycle run several times if the last page printed was more than a day previous. Since each cleaning cycle discarded a bunch of ink, it could easily mean that an infrequently-used early inkjet could have a per-sheet cost of printing that exceeded 50 cents per page. (In one particularly memorable case for me, an HP 855c managed to have a per-page cost of over $5 per properly-printed full-color-output page over the three years I had it. I still use their lasers, but I don't buy their inkjets at all.)
Later versions of inkjets arrived on the market using just a replaceable ink tank; the better ones used individual tanks for each color. Although the cost of the ink remained high, the per-page printing cost was reduced...and if generic ink tanks were available, the cost could drop to under a penny a page. To reduce the competition from generic ink, the printer manufacturers switched to ink tanks with a small, inexpensive (but proprietary) chip in the end; without the chip, the printer failed to recognize the tank's presence, and often wouldn't work at all. If that chip was actually measuring the ink usage instead of just keeping a theoretical tally of it, this might have been laudable...but in reality, the chips tend to tell the printer that replacement is required even though there's still plenty of ink left. And as before, each cleaning cycle uses up a bunch of extra ink. Individual chipped tanks can cost $60 for a set, and may last for as few as 30 pages or as many as 1200, depending on what's being printed and how often the printer is used. For people who print things multiple times per day, every day of the week, the newer inkjets usually aren't a bad deal...but if you often go for days at a time without generating any hardcopy, even these later inkjets can be much too expensive to operate.
Laser printers, on the other hand, have a cost per sheet that's pretty much determined by how much toner is used for each page. Text doesn't use much, and typical lasers can print a page for at most a few cents. Laser cartridges don't remain functional forever, even if they still have plenty of toner left; the user who prints just a single page infrequently may still find that in the long run, a laser's output isn't really cost-effective.
On the other hand, if there's a FedEx Office store nearby, one additional option is to just ditch the whole printer-ownership thing, and upload documents to their printer. The per-page cost still isn't cheap, and you really need to carefully preview what's going to be produced, but it has the distinct advantage of not requiring space on your desk, and not requiring that you keep consumables around that, in the case of inkjets in particular, end up getting wasted more than used.
My recommendations:
For daily, heavy use, if color output isn't needed, get a laser.
For daily, heavy use, if color is needed, get an inkjet that uses separate tanks.
For daily, moderate use, both inkjets and lasers are suitable.
For daily, light use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For less frequent use, stay with a laser unless color is required.
For occasional use, abandon trying to have color output, and get a laser...or just print out your hardcopy at a nearby FedEx Office if that's a viable option. (You may spend less, even in the long run, than you would by buying a "cheap" printer.)
Color lasers have a high per-page cost regardless of how much they're used; unless you need their specific qualities, I can't say that I would recommend them at all.
There you have it. Kill some trees.
Product Review: H-E-B Pomegranate Black Tea
Short version: Eeeeewwww!
For those who live outside Texas, H-E-B is a grocery store chain that serves much of the central and eastern part of the state; it's generally a reliable source for comestibles of all types, and their store brand items have tended to be pretty good in the past. This, sadly, is not one that I can recommend.
For the sake of accuracy, the item is sold under UPC 041220648030, and it's a box of 20 bags with a total net weight of 1.27 ounces. The price was less than $2, which seemed like a relative bargain given the much stiffer tabs for the majority of the boutique brands. At best, this means that I have lost less than the price of a hamburger, and will only be discarding 1.21 ounces of product, plus packaging. (Yes, I could take it back and get a refund, but it's hardly worth the effort for this small amount, and I didn't keep the receipt anyway.)
One would hope that a pomegranate black tea would have some fruitiness about it, including perhaps a bit of the aroma, flavor and color of the presumed ingredient. What presented itself upon brewing was a light-colored non-reddish cup with a pronounced crushed-snails aroma that was not improved in the least by the added slight minty note. It was distinctly reminiscent of the cough syrups containing guaifenesin, a mucus-loosening medicine. I took one experimental sip to discern whether the flavor might redeem the brew, but alas, the taste proved only slightly less offensive than the bouquet, with not a hint of fruit about it in any way.
Recommendation: Serve this brewed very strong, to people who you prefer never to have visiting you again in the future. Use boxes of it as a gift in the annual Secret Santa ritual if you're planning on swapping to a new job in January anyway. Give it to the obnoxious loon next door who's been going on at length about how proud he is to be a teabagger. But don't drink it yourself.
For those who live outside Texas, H-E-B is a grocery store chain that serves much of the central and eastern part of the state; it's generally a reliable source for comestibles of all types, and their store brand items have tended to be pretty good in the past. This, sadly, is not one that I can recommend.
For the sake of accuracy, the item is sold under UPC 041220648030, and it's a box of 20 bags with a total net weight of 1.27 ounces. The price was less than $2, which seemed like a relative bargain given the much stiffer tabs for the majority of the boutique brands. At best, this means that I have lost less than the price of a hamburger, and will only be discarding 1.21 ounces of product, plus packaging. (Yes, I could take it back and get a refund, but it's hardly worth the effort for this small amount, and I didn't keep the receipt anyway.)
One would hope that a pomegranate black tea would have some fruitiness about it, including perhaps a bit of the aroma, flavor and color of the presumed ingredient. What presented itself upon brewing was a light-colored non-reddish cup with a pronounced crushed-snails aroma that was not improved in the least by the added slight minty note. It was distinctly reminiscent of the cough syrups containing guaifenesin, a mucus-loosening medicine. I took one experimental sip to discern whether the flavor might redeem the brew, but alas, the taste proved only slightly less offensive than the bouquet, with not a hint of fruit about it in any way.
Recommendation: Serve this brewed very strong, to people who you prefer never to have visiting you again in the future. Use boxes of it as a gift in the annual Secret Santa ritual if you're planning on swapping to a new job in January anyway. Give it to the obnoxious loon next door who's been going on at length about how proud he is to be a teabagger. But don't drink it yourself.
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