<TEAPARTY> You gots to pay attention to what is important! No wonder the teaparty wants to get the gummint off'n their backs. No wonder the rump of the GOP wants to slash gummint spending. You gots to pay attention to what is important!
What is important is this: Last year's regulatory ban on sodium triphosphate in automatic dishwasher detergent has led to spotty glassware and blotchy plasticware. My ghod, what is the world coming to? Can't they just leave us alone? There's a ground-swell of people in a snit. They've flushed their dishwashers with bleach and all manner of household chemicals. They've changed detergent brands. They've taken their dishwashers apart to look for crud. They've taken them to repair shops or gone out and bought new ones. The most pathetic of them have found the economic times bad enough that they can't afford to replace their putatively defective washers. All because of the missing phosphate. Those with time and sufficient determination are driving 50 or 100 miles to cross state lines to places where the Classic Coke^H^H^H^H Cascade is still available and buying case lots. The rest are reduced to onerous solutions such as hand-rinsing, hand-wiping or other mortifyingly infra-dig methods. All those TV ads? All those TCiaK [1] detergent bits? Where cheap glassware has CGI sparkle-animations glistering from every convex surface? It's not like that any more. What are we gonna do? Get the gummint off'n our backs. http://www.appliance.net/2010/states-ban-phosphate-laden-dishwasher-soap-1988 The ground-swell of public outrage over dingy dishes is inducing corresponding turbulence in the industry and in the industries that supply the industry. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8904cover.html All this foolishness about debt ceiling, economics, military spending, dead babies in Iraq and environment -- they're all side issues. Let us have our phosphates, sparkly glasses and shiny plastic epergnes and cereal bowls back! </TEAPARTY> Jeez, I'm so tired of stupid people. I went in to a farm supply and feed place to buy a replacement fence charger for my electric deer fence. I say, "Do you have fence chargers?" She looks at me blankly. I say, "You know, the thing that puts the high voltage electricity on an electric fence." Confused frown. She says, "Welll... we have fencers..." and leads me to a display of objects, each conspicuously labeled at the factory in large letters, FENCE CHARGER. And I have a bottle of "Hand Cleaner" clearly marked "Avoid contact with skin". Jeez, like the reverse of Adm. Hopper's problem with the shampoo: Grace Hopper, the grand old lady of computing, once commented on the instructions she found on a bottle of shampoo: Wash. Rinse. Repeat. She tried to follow the directions, but she ran out of shampoo. Makes the hand cleaner last a loooong time. To try desperately to drag this OT rant back on topic, I surmise that the doctrine underlying the problems of "work, income distribution, education" that we address here is, "Hey, most people are stupid as a sack of rocks. And we can get away with exploiting that." We all know this but don't know what to do about it, thus the shchadenfreude we're all enjoying on behalf of Murdoch & Fils. Pete wrote: [Initially quoting someone somewhere on the net...] "Revolutions are started by lean and hungry people. America has not reached that point yet, but perhaps with the price of food rising and the return of all of those soldiers once the wars end, there will be a fighting force in place to finally level the playing field." So I guess the notion of reaction to the demolition of their country by its self-serving elite is beginning to surface after all. There are some guys over on Usenet's rec.crafts.metalworking [2], in particular one who travels under the handle of Gunner Asch, who are predicting that all those freedom-loving people with attics full of firearms are going to rise up Real Soon Now and cull [their word] the fat cats and corrupt politicians. Not that they have a plan for afterwards, you know, but they're pretty steamed and unstable-sounding. They're pretty sure that SWAT teams with attack helicopters and rocket launchers won't be a problem and that that the "real" military will switch sides when the time comes. And now back to you more restrained, reasoned and cogent programming... [1] Technical term from the ad biz. NSFW, if you don't know, you don't want to know etc. [2] Where, regrettably, there is twice as much rabid political chatter as metalwork talk. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
