MooPig Evolving Budget Department :: "Wisdom in the Do Not's"

Putting it all in Perspective?
Retrieved by Pat Darnell  |  Jan 9, 2014  |  Bryan TX

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How to live like a king for very little By THOR HARRIS « Monofonus Press: EXCERPT  |  

1.  Don’t smoke cigarettes.
2.  Drive old Japanese cars.  Easy and cheap to fix and they run for fucking ever.
3.  Buy most of your groceries from the produce section.  Most of that other shit is not actually food. You don’t need it.
4.  Ride your bike instead of driving as much as you can. You need the exercise and gas is expensive.
5.  Don’t have kids.  They’re not miracles, they’re people.  7 billion is too fucking many. Find some other way to give your dull existence some meaning. BTW they’re expensive."
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16. Preventable expenses - STD’s, abortions, DWI’s, lung cancer, head injuries, speeding tickets, cirrhosis of the liver.
17. Don’t go on fancy dates if you’re not fancy. Most people kind of despise the rich anyway.
18. When you go see shows, bring a flask in. That way you can afford to buy a record.
19. If you had told me 15 years ago that Coca Cola would put tap water in plastic bottles and motherfuckers would BUY IT …… No fuckin way.
20. Don’t get cable. Asshole. There is nothing on. I promise. $100 a month ? Fuck no!

This list was edited by Stacey Yates with contributions from Jherek Bishoff, Chad Raines and Amanda Palmer. We live in a wasteful society. Live well. It don’t take much. Really.



'via Blog this'
 And those are priceless suggestions for keeping costs down... but we have a few ourselves.

21. Don't buy electronics when they come out. But them when they are only pennies on the dollar 30 months after they appear on the market.

22. Don't Christmas shop before Christmas ... do all your shopping after December, just give your kids vouchers of what they can expect for say, le Befana Day, on January 6th.

23. It's okay to have kids, as long as you raise them as if they are poor.

24. Never join a pyramid marketing scam unless you are the first person to start it.

25. Never declare bankruptcy, just work for cash for eleven years and use cash for all your purchases, at the end of which you will have good credit.

26. The payback on buying land or real estate is around twelve years.

27. Invest in shoe leather.

28. Don't give money to cults.

_____________________Reference
http://monofonuspress.com/how-to-live-like-a-king-for-very-little-by-thor-harris

Government Shutdown: 9 Million Moms And Babies At Risk As WIC Program Halts - Forbes

Government Shutdown: 9 Million Moms And Babies At Risk As WIC Program Halts - Forbes: "The government shutdown may be keeping National Parks closed and furloughed federal workers at home, but worse real-world effects could soon be felt by low-income mothers and their infants — already a marginalized group with unstable food supplies."

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________________________Reference
http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2013/10/02/government-shutdown-9-million-moms-and-babies-at-risk-as-wic-program-halts/

MooPig Horse Bits :: "Eating Horse - A Modest Proposal"

Scooped by Pat Darnell  |  Feb 27, 2013  |  Bryan TX

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In our quest to be clever in the face of bombast, MooPig has recently stumbled upon a situation. Europeans have been mixing horse meat with their beef and selling it to the public to eat. And much of the horse meat comes from exported American horses.

We may be opening Pandora's lunchbox here, as beef shortages are reported, that Americans might have to start eating some horse themselves. Be warned.

What we are warning about is that Monsanto might have already purchased all the patents and copy rights on all horse meat. Yes, they are usually way ahead of the curve when it comes to malnutrition. Can horses be the new genetically modified meat source? And, when that source is depleted, what is next?

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal: "”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. ...”"

Are nations looking for easy answers to complex problems? You bet they are. It's a classic tale, feed the poor with the poor, feed the rich with the poor... it's the circle of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. (Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). LINK)

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NEXT WEEK  :: The next big thing -- Australians are about to discover that they've been eating a combination of emu, roo, and lamb as "beef" for years -- which probably explains why Australian life expectancy is so much better than American, British or Canadian life expectancy. Eh?

__________________________Reference
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
http://grist.org/news/why-shouldnt-you-eat-horse/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=update
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2013/02/the-horsemeat-scandal-an-object-lesson-in-food-politics/
http://grist.org/list/2011-12-01-eating-horses-is-legal-now-and-peta-loves-it/
http://grist.org/list/we-used-to-respect-animals-enough-to-give-them-a-fair-trial-before-putting-them-to-death/
http://www.fark.com/comments/7567982/Burger-King-makes-a-whopper-of-an-admission

The Customer Service Hall of Shame

The word for June 09 is iBrick

Apple's iPhone before activation. Refers to how useless it is when it can't do anything, and its striking resemblance to a brick.

I can't activate my iPhone, so I'm sitting at my computer crying and staring at my iBrick.

By Karen Aho
The economy's in the tank. Corporate profits are down. Business owners are having just as hard a time getting loans as wannabe homeowners.

"So you'd think that businesses would be treating their patrons like royalty, right? That this would be exactly the right time for businesses to coddle their customers?

"Wrong. When the economic going gets tough, some companies apparently get tough-minded about customer service, squeezing out the last dime of profit by cutting back on critical customer-facing positions such as phone personnel.

"We've seen a fall in customer service as we've gone into a recession," said Richard D. Hanks, the president of Mindshare Technologies, a customer-service consulting company. "As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things."

"That reality is borne out in the results of MSN Money's second annual Customer Service Hall of Shame, a ranking of companies with the worst customer service, based on a nationwide survey commissioned by MSN Money and conducted by Zogby International. The scores for our Hall of Shame companies are, on average, down from a year ago.

"And the 'winner' is . . . The company at the bottom of the customer-service heap is Time Warner's AOL. A remarkable 47% of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." Analysts said that rating may have something to do with its effort to transition from an Internet service provider -- where it still has more than 9.3 million paying subscribers -- to an ad-supported Web portal.

"I don't know what to attribute that to," AOL spokeswoman Dori Salcido said. "I just do know that we continue to improve customer service."

(Retrieved three days ago here: Click to read the entire report --
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SmartSpending/ConsumerActionGuide/TheCustomerServiceHallOfShame.aspx )