71–80 of 175 posts
I agree that red delicious are terrible eating apples but most of the newer varieties seem to be a bit on the sweet side for my liking. Braeburn has the perfect balance of tart and sweet while being consistently crisp.
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I think that the reasoning against shipping apples across the globe is that consumers do not pay the full price; one might argue that the transportation is subsidised by our extraction and burning of oil at a rate much quicker than it is formed
Hmmm, I can get behind the idea that oil isn't priced appropriately given it's externalities, but I would've focused on CO2, with a carbon tax being the solution, rather than looking at the rate at which oil is reformed.
We are depleting oil reserves at about 5 million times the rate they formed.[1] Corollary: oil price reflects an off-books depletion factor of roughly 5 million-fold. The price is vastly too low.
Our fossil fuel consumption translated to present total biomass production (NPP, or the "photosynthetic ceiling"), is a very substantial fraction of all plant growth, I believe about 40%. We currently account for 20% of NPP consumption without utilising biomass as fuel.[1]
The history of why extractive natural resources are costed on a labour-required basis only (and some very questionable economic and legal theories support this) is an interesting accident of history, religion, law, geology, business, oil, and more. I've been digging into that, though have further to go. The short answer is that we'd started using the stuff long before we understood its creation, and by the time we understood we pretended not to care.[2]
The history of oil price response to overextraction in particular is mesmerising, with the booms at Titusville, Spindletop, and East Texas especially. The latter saw price per barrel fall from a $1 target, to $0.13, and then further to $0.02/bbl, before the national (and effectively global) production quota system managed by, of all organisations, the Texas Railroad Commission, was established in 1931. That lasted until 1972, after which you may be aware oil's price fluctuated somewhat.[3]
Similar issues exist for other strategic minerals, as first grasped during WWII, leading to the creation of the Harbord List, now the U.S. Strategic Mineral Reserve.[4]
(Oil is also subject to strategic reserves. You may be aware of an incident involving the U.S. Naval Strategic Petroleum Reserve a few years back, the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration.[5])
Until the early 20th century, only direct labour was considered as a cost of production.[6]
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Notes:
1. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... See also https://redd.it/2cvap7 and https://redd.it/1x9maq
2. Partial expansion here https://redd.it/5w1zw3 and here https://redd.it/5rnjg0 In particular, the religion and Young Earth Creationist associations are fascinating.
3 Daniel Yergin, The Prize, chapter 13 generally, though also the history of monopolies and cartels: Standard Oil, As-Is Agreement, Seven Sisters, National Producers, OPEC. http://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-m...
For oil price, BP's Annual Statistical Review. See:
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4defd684cadcbbe55e0...
Current report: http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stati...
4. E.g., http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article33647.html
5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal
6. Alexander Hamilton Church, Production factors in cost accounting and works management, 1910, p. 9.
https://archive.org/stream/productionfactor00churrich#page/8...
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Local news to the rescue! (= * Why Honeycrisp apples are so expensive - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4eQX2vZ_Zg * The Story Behind Honeycrisps, America's First Brand-Name Apple || http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a20018/honeycrisp-pri... And look, hope for better apples on the horizon! * Washington Apple Growers Sink Their Teeth Into The New Cosmic Crisp : The Salt : NPR || http://www.npr.org/sec…
TL;DR on first link: - They're not hardy (trees need support, apples are thin skinned, and they ripen at different times) - A university holds a patent on the tree (only $1 per tree, tho)
I HATED Red Delicious as a kid! Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.
One day, Royal Gala started showing up and I basically just ate those exclusively until this new wave of "designer Apples"
The article seems oriented toward raw consumption, I like to experiment with food canning and I've made many single variety batches of applesauce to experiment with. Pure grannies are a little acidic to me. My kids like red delicious applesauce, for something thats basically sweet with a texture its not bad. Ida Red results in an extremely pale nearly white applesauce which is interesting looking but the taste is bor…
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Why? If they're shipping Pink Ladies from New Zealand, and there's an efficient market, can't we imply that it's a better allocation of resources to get Pink Ladies from New Zealand? I mean, they're probably cheaper _even though_ they're getting shipped halfway across the world. What the market is saying is that: the highly skilled population of Germany is probably better off doing more advanced things than growing a…
I think the concern is about externalities like co2. It could also be a quality concern about doing stuff like picking food super raw and waiting for it to ripen in transit, which seems less than ideal. But your point about the efficient market is certainly valid FWIW.
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I don't understand what you're trying to say. How is morality relevant at all here?
Not the parent but I'll take a stab at this anyway. None of this is actually about moralizing, but very much about signaling that one is part of the cohort of "discerning" consumers (who wouldn't be caught dead , darling, eating a Red Delicious), and not among those great unwashed backwoods jerkwater hordes who eat them because they don't know any better. Hence the religion-like simplicity of the message "red delicio…
No "k" in Macintosh, but this is a weird statement to me. Macs are very popular in Canada and virtually every grocery store that I've been in carries them (in Ontario anyways). They can be really excellent fresh off the tree but are generally a fair to middling apple in my opinion.
Red Delicious apples are horrible. Pink Ladies if you can find them, Honeycrisp if you can't.
I don't really get the love for Honeycrisps. I mean, they're better than Red Deliciouses, sure. But they're still too... blandly sweet, I guess, for my tastes. I like Pink Ladies, and I like Granny Smiths. That sharper, more acidic taste, I suppose.
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Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as…
The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have. I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other th…
It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.
It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.
The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm, I can get behind the idea that oil isn't priced appropriately given it's externalities, but I would've focused on CO2, with a carbon tax being the solution, rather than looking at the rate at which oil is reformed.
Time is a factor of production. We are depleting oil reserves at about 5 million times the rate they formed.[1] Corollary: oil price reflects an off-books depletion factor of roughly 5 million-fold. The price is vastly too low. Our fossil fuel consumption translated to present total biomass production (NPP, or the "photosynthetic ceiling"), is a very substantial fraction of all plant growth, I believe about 40%. We c…
It's important to know that when considering the factor of 5 million you toss out there.
