Less For More, More Often

Twinkies are back. I like twinkies, a lot of the bad things you hear about the snack are bullshit or no worse than any other food product. The one thing I’d like to address is the difference in the old snack and its reincarnation, size. The new twinkies are slightly smaller. It should be noted that the size change isn’t something the current makers of twinkies came up with. The size change was actually made before Hostess went out of business the first time. It was an attempt to save on costs. The attempt was too little too late. That is not always the case and this type of business practice has become all the rage.

Ice cream makers re-defining the measurement of their product quietly. The candy bar makers making that candy bar just a bit thinner or maybe just the chocolate covering. Adding air to a product and pronouncing it “dreamy” or “delightfully light”  all the while the ruse is on. The only thing that has changed is your willingness to pay for empty space.

Paying for stuff filled with “air”? Sucker.

When is the last time you saw a product announce it was cutting its size and it’s price? That would at least be honest. It’s the sneaky factor that worries me. Everybody and their parent company are trying to pull a fast one on us just to make more money.

Tropicana was one company thinking of the customer. When there was a big freeze and it effected orange crops. They tried to think of a way to keep the freeze from having an impact on their customers. The solution they came up with was to drop the size of the container by 5oz from 64oz to 59oz.  That way the price per ounce went up but nobody was effected because what you don’t know can’t hurt you , right?

You’re gonna pay extra and like it. Get it?

Pre-mixed anti-freeze, but there is no mention the mix consists of anti-freeze and ….water. The price? Sometimes even more that you would pay for anti-freeze without that hard to get extra water they add.

When you sell a million of something all you have to do is cut a little to make a lot. Sometimes companies are bulking up the packaging to make it appear like you are getting the same amount of product or even more when that isn’t the case. Revlon is pulling this trick with it’s lipgloss. Revlon decided to bulk up packaging for Superlustrous glosses but you are actually getting less product.  The new version only has .13 ounces, while the old version had .20 ounces. Guess what? Priced the same.

Jif peanut butter just reduced their 18oz jar by 11% no notice, nothing. They are counting on you being distracted or just dumb. This plan is working wonderfully so far and it is spreading like wildfire.

If that isn’t enough  Angel Soft was bragging on it’s packaging it contains “70% more.” Then the next packaging design dropped the 70% claim and added a more subtle change from 400sq ft to 354sq ft  while keeping the price the same.

Is it a problem? Here are some more products  that have been downsizing on the downlow. Oreos, Dawn soap, Dial soap, Bounty, Pampers, Gillette Fusion, Hefty, Kleenex *

I’m not sure how we stop it but if you contact the companies who are trying to quietly pick our pockets some will send you coupons as a sort of “we’re sorry”. It will also let them know we are paying attention and don’t like being taken advantage of.

Here are links to a couple companies to file a complaint about this downsizing trend.

Kleenex

Kraft/Nabisco

 

 

*source http://incredibleshrinkinggroceries.com/

Other links-

Consumerist

Consumerworld

Less For More, More Often

Porn be gone!

Baptist preacher Jay Dennis of the First Baptist Church at the Mall in Lakeland, Florida wants to stop porn. It’s worse than crack cocaine he says. He says it’s been called the new bubonic plague. Maybe a little dramatic considering without treatment, the bubonic plague kills about two thirds of infected humans within 4 days. In the 14th century it killed an estimated 25 million people, or 30–60% of the European population. We would be in serious trouble if jay was right about the plague thing.

I went and checked out The First Baptist Church at the Mall  and it is legit. Jay Dennis even mentions atheists in one of his posts “I am Intolerant of the ACLU and Atheist Groups who tout First Amendment Rights yet attempt to shut down any praying in government or education, want to remove Christmas from our vocabulary in the public sector, and won’t rest until they remove every cross from any public place”  ( I contacted him about this already)

Jay is currently taking on porn. He claims it is the #1 issue effecting men in the Christian church. He says 80% of men in the church are struggling with porn on some level. To battle this evil which must involve Satan somehow. Jay has started Join 1 Million Men.

Join 1 Million Men is “a daily process of surrendering to the holy spirit” and some other stuff and biblical truth. Jay doesn’t care if you have to “destroy your personal computer” you need to get porn out of your life because it causes men to become useless masturbating bums who don’t go to work and need to touch their penis just like a crack head needs a rock.

Jay is asking men to take the pledge to remove porn from their lives from now until they go to heaven. I guess if you go to hell you are out of luck but if you go to heaven that’s the end of the pledge and you’ll be watching the archangel banging the hell (so to speak) out of some naughty nurses before you know it!

According to the anti-porn crusader the chances your son has seen some porn is nearly 100%.  Satan uses porn as a tool ( get it?) to do evil stuff to your children and distract them from the usual stuff 10 year old boys do, like masturbation. Hey that doesn’t make any…..whatever.    The catch is you have to be a boy 10 years old or over to join in the pledge so all you 6-9 years old boys get your porn in while you can cause before you know it you will be limited to watching naked characters on the cartoon network. At least until you get to heaven, then it’s “Debbie Does The Last Supper” every Friday night for eternity.

I checked out “the wall” where men can sign and pledge to remove all the porn from their lives. So far a little over 500 men have made the pledge to smash their computers if needed to keep from watching porn. I guess that’s a lot. It’s more than I expected to see.

Think of how happy this guy would be watching porn. Maybe there is a problem

While there is a certain percentage of the population that claim to have an addiction to porn so serious that it negatively effects their lives I don’t understand the need to remove it totally from everyone’s life. There are 10x as many people who watch porn and have no problem.

I  started thinking – Jay seems to be in denial of is a lot of women watch porn too. What about them? Jay also doesn’t consider the number of couples who may have saved their marriage by making porn part of their sexual routine. He is out to remove it altogether. Well my questions were soon answered. There is a wall for women too. The wall for women is not to pledge that they wont look at porn it is a pledge to help stop men from watching porn. Maybe he figures if the men get rid of it the women will have to obey. There is one tiny problem. Only 168 women have committed to stopping the men from looking at porn vs 500+ men who said they would remove it from their lives. I see a possible conflict arising from this whole thing.

Another  thing Jay never mentions is those damn Mormons. Those perverts watch more online porn than any other state in the USA according to the last poll I saw on the subject. Does he have plans to deal with them in the future?

I’ll give jay credit, he does seem to be taking a hardline on this, he isn’t gonna go soft on porn. Even if he has to bang on and look behind every green door in his city, he will be grabbing people’s knockers and having a three-way with couples across his town to spread his news. He will go down every alley, even if he makes himself look like a boob in the process. Jay knows in the end he can hold his head erect and know that when it came to porn he rubbed it out as hard and fast as he could.

He even has a booklet called “The Hardcore Battle Plan” that comes in one version for men and one for women.

Here is Jay’s video promoting his Join 1 Million Men crusade.

Introduction from New Hope Publishers on Vimeo.

 

I’d also like to offer my help to Jay Dennis by offering to take any porn his followers want to get rid of and making sure they never see it again. Who says I never rise to the occasion?

Porn be gone!

Small Battle Won

 

Closed- No apologies will be issued

   While talking with Ally Fogg from FTB this past week I brought up the dungeon. The dungeon was a page where PZ Myers would list the people he had banned from his blog in a strange childlike manner. It was like   looking at the notches on a belt. For every character assassination there was a name and the manner in which their character has been killed with libel by PZ.  Ally claimed no knowledge of it and after the conversation I wondered what the dungeon looked like since PZ was banning anyone who was associated with the slymepit and he claimed I had created more than 30 fake accounts then there should be quite a list. At least 30 names supposedly on account of me alone.

When I went to look….the dungeon was gone. How could this be? I wondered how, what , why? Could it be that PZ had finally seen the light and recognized his behavior was juvenile and unfair? Could we count on PZ to focus on real issues instead of the regular trashing of someone based on some paranoid delusion in PZ’s head?  Then I found this. It’s a post from June 10th 2013 called No More Mr. Nice Guy. (allow me to suggest PZ get someone to write his titles for him cause they usually make no sense)

After reading the post I was a little let-down. PZ never mentions how his dungeon may have been unfair  or a bad idea.

He says

So yes, I’m fed up and I’ll be taking stronger action against these trolls and other assholes. But that does not in any way imply that I’m silencing disagreement…but that’s the message the trolls and assholes want to send out, to foment more harassment.I don’t ban that many people, and those that I do kick out, I try to be open about it, listing their names on the Dungeon page. Which leads to the other lie: that I’m unusually censorious. It turns out that being transparent about necessary banning actions, while just about every other goddamn blog out there just invisibly disappears objectionable junk, leads these phonies to make up more lies about policies here.

So I’m also changing something else. The Dungeon is gone. From now on, if you’re a jerk, you just get zapped and disappear forever, with no documentation, just like it’s done on the blogs of the assholes who accuse me of banning people for disagreeing with me.

It’ll save me a little work, too.

It’s kinda strange cause the people PZ disagrees with are often referred to as “assholes”, “jerks” or “slymers” which are all also the same terms he uses when talking about the people he has banned. I wonder, could this be the cause of some of the confusion PZ claims there is among critics of his policies?  I think so. PZ needs to be more clear or admit that as soon as someone doesn’t choose to see things his way in what he considers a proper amount of time they are told to shut up. If that instruction is not followed then they are banned. PZ doesn’t ban you for disagreeing, he bans you for not shutting up about your disagreement and for not changing your mind to agree with him. (note: you can also be banned for saying uncomplimentary things about his “horde”)

PZ also says he will be taking “stronger action” against the trolls and assholes. I don’t know what action he is planning on taking since there really is very little he can do about people who are posting comments unless he starts to approve comments.

Now if we could get PZ Myers on board the “No personal attacks” train then we will be on our way to a more peaceful interaction between not just skeptics and atheists but with believers too. I think a good way to ease into that would be for PZ to start better controlling his comment section. In the past he has bragged about how tough his horde is when in actuality they are just mean and intent on hurting people.Very little of their content is valid counter arguments, it is mostly personal insults, playground caliber name calling and threats. The number of people who seem to use PZ’s comment section as a way to vent frustrations is disturbing.

After all is said and done even with PZ making a clear attempt pretend this is all just because he choose to do it and the motivation was all the lies being told about him…it is a win.

PZ did something right by taking the dungeon page down and I will give him credit for that. It’s still too bad it wasn’t done because PZ recognized it was unfair and wrong but at least he has been stopped from continuously misrepresenting people. Pressure from others was also a factor so there is hope.

Not only that but it saves me a little work too.

Side-note: People can quit assuming I am somehow ‘obsessed’ with PZ too since it took a month for me to notice he posted about the removal I obviously don’t pay nearly the attention he claims I do. Sorry PZ, wrong about me again buddy, keep trying.

 

 

Small Battle Won