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If You Had Bought Apple Stock Instead of That Apple Product…
Published on March 15th, 2011, Dvorak: Uncensored
Let us pretend for a moment that the year is 1997 and you’re in the market for a new laptop computer. You want the top-of-the-line product at the time, so you opt for the newly released Apple Computer PowerBook G3 250 laptop. This revolutionary piece of technology, which comes with a 250-megahertz processor and a whopping 5 gigabytes of storage, will set you back $5,700.
If you held onto that laptop until today you would probably be able to sell it on eBay for about $50.
Now imagine that instead of buying the Apple PowerBook in 1997, you decided to spend $5,700 on Apple stock. You would have done a little better. Indeed, today your Apple stock would be worth $330,563. Probably makes you think twice buying about that laptop.Here’s the complete list.
Preventing preterm births just got 150 times more expensive, now that KV Pharmaceuticals has gained exclusive rights to produce a progesterone shot used to prevent premature births in high-risk mothers.
Although the shot has been available in unregulated form from specialty compounding pharmacies for years for $10 a pop, the Food and Drug Administration recently granted KV Pharmaceuticals sole rights to produce the drug, which will be marketed as Makena and cost $1,500 per dose — an estimated $30,000 in total per pregnancy.[Let's hear it for free enterprise!]
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WHERE'S THE BEEF? Taco Bell “beef” pseudo-Mexican delicacies are really made of a gross mixture called “Taco Meat Filling” as shown on their big container’s labels. The list of ingredients is gruesome:
*Beef, water, isolated oat product, salt, chili pepper, onion powder, tomato powder, oats (wheat), soy lecithin, sugar, spices, maltodextrin (a polysaccharide that is absorbed as glucose), soybean oil (anti-dusting agent), garlic powder, autolyzed yeast extract, citric acid, caramel color, cocoa powder, silicon dioxide (anti-caking agent), natural flavors, yeast, modified corn starch, natural smoke flavor, salt, sodium phosphate, less than 2% of beef broth, potassium phosphate, and potassium lactate.
It looks bad but passable… until you learn that—according to the Alabama law firm suing Taco Bell—only 36% of that is beef. Thirty-six percent. The other 64% is mostly tasteless fibers, various industrial additives and some flavoring and coloring. Everything is processed into a mass that actually looks like beef, and packed into big containers labeled as “taco meat filling.” These containers get shipped to Taco Bell’s outlets and cooked into something that looks like beef, is called beef and is advertised as beef by the fast food chain.**********
What a relief: Bloomberg News reports that despite the continued effects of the recession felt by many Americans (unemployment levels, for example, still hover near 9 percent), corporations are posting some of their highest profits in decades.
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Jed Lewison, Daily Kos:
Palin Trails Charlie Sheen Among Independents
We've found a lot of brutal poll numbers for Sarah Palin so far in 2011: down in South Dakota, down in South Carolina, down in Arizona, only up by 1 point in Texas, only up by 1 point in Nebraska to name a few. But this has to be the worst -- independent voters say they would support Charlie Sheen over Palin for President by a 41/36 margin. Seriously.
Despite her deficit with independents, Palin does lead Sheen 49-29 overall.
We also tested Barack Obama against Sheen, and the President leads 57-24.
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Again, Jed Lewison from Daily Kos:
Roll Call reports that the Republican Party is "looking to shore up its credibility on job creation" and quotes a GOP leadership aide offering this gem:
Everybody’s concern is that in the midst of this spending fight, we get caught up and forget to talk about jobs.Great, so instead of worrying about actually doing something about creating jobs, their only concern is talking about doing something about creating jobs. In other words, they think they already are doing enough to create jobs; it's just a question of talking about it.
Well, I can't wait to hear them talk about how having emergency meetings to defund NPR, banning family planning funding, kicking kids off of Head Start, attacking Planned Parenthood, funding contraception for horses, staging hearings to accuse American Muslims of being terrorists, protecting subsidies for big oil, talking about impeaching Obama over DOMA, reading an edited version of the Constitution, and cutting tsunami preparedness funding are actually job creation measures for anybody other than GOP consultants.
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Blanketing the World With Doom
Published on March 15th, 2011 - Dvorak: Uncensored
If you thought you had less than three perfectly healthy months to live, what would you do? Would you travel? Spend time with loved ones? Appreciate the joy life has given you? Or would you ditch your kids and grandkids, join strangers in a caravan of RVs and travel the country warning people about the end of the world? If you’re Sheila Jonas, that’s exactly what you’d do. [...] Like her cohorts, she’s “in it ’til the end,” which she believes is coming in May.
[...]
Starting with one station in Oakland, California, in 1959, [Harold] Camping’s Family Radio now boasts 66 stations across the United States. Thanks to strategically placed satellites, shortwave radio and the internet, the message has gone global in 61 languages. [...] But Camping also happens to be the man who once said September 6, 1994, would be the big day.
He explains now that he originally thought 2011 was the year, but a few [bible] verses tripped him up and he concluded that the Great Tribulation might get cut short. There was still scripture he was grappling with, end-time signs that were to come — he points to the gay pride movement as one of them — and truths that had yet to be revealed, “but because of the urgency of time I had to get it out quickly,” he says of his previous warning.
This time around, he has no doubts.
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