Costco's 'Mini-Piglet'
By Curtis Cartier (Seattle Weekly) Feast your eyes on the Mini Piglet! This pressure-formed pig-shaped pork monstrosity is a revolution in culinary alliteration (looks and tastes like the animal it began as). And it’s on sale at Costco right now!
via ‘Mini Piglet’ Is Costco’s Most Horrid Meat Abomination – Seattle News – The Daily Weekly.
By George Monbiot (The Guardian UK) The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin.
By Linda Searing (Washington Post) This study involved 623 children who were born in the mid-1980s weighing 4.4 pounds or less. Their health was assessed periodically, including screening for autism spectrum disorders at age 16 and evaluations to confirm the diagnosis, using standardized measures, at age 21. Overall, 5 percent of the youths had autism spectrum disorder diagnoses, a rate described as five times that found in the general U.S. population. The lower the birth weight, the higher the likelihood of an autism diagnosis, with a 10.6 percent prevalence among those who weighed 3.3 pounds at birth and a 3.7 percent prevalence at 4.4 pounds.
Source: November issue of Pediatrics
In 1966, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys entered the studio to compose Smile, an album that he believed would transform not just the band, but the face of popular music. What happened next – captured by writer Jules Siegel, who had spent months in the Beach Boys’ inner circle – would become legend. “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God,” Siegel’s account of the tortured efforts to complete Smile, ran in Cheetah magazine, helping to create the legacy of Wilson’s madcap genius and the mystique around rock’s greatest lost album. The following is adapted from Siegel’s original 1967 story, recently resurrected by The Atavist as an ebook single for the Kindle and Nook, and as a multimedia production in The Atavist iPhone/iPad app.
“I’m writing a teenage symphony to God,” Brian Wilson told dinner guests on an October evening.
By Adele Stan, Nov 2, 2011
(AFL-CIO Now) In its fourth quarter earnings report released last week, Apple Computer revealed that 2/3 of its on-hand cash – some $54 billion — is squirreled away outside the boundaries of the United States, presumably to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. In the meantime, reports Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based group, Apple’s major manufacturing contractors routinely subject employees to forced overtime, wage theft and no breaks — and even unprotected exposure to toxins.
Apple, together with rival tech firm Google, have been lobbying for a “tax holiday” that would allow them to bring some of those billions into the U.S. at a lower tax rate, promising that to do so would create jobs. But, as we reported, a similar measure tried in 2004 created few jobs, and instead rewarded companies that had kept their money overseas. Where Apple has created jobs is in China, where the workers who make its slick products are made to work in deplorable conditions.
via Apple Computer Hoards Cash, Makes Products in Abusive Conditions | AFL-CIO NOW BLOG.