Maybe he cares mostly about maximal salad-value per dollar?
1: For that, I would think cheezes are your best bet, being relatively light and expensive.
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Someone on my Facebook feed is wishing happy birthday to Jetpack, but I don't think she knows Sifu. Surely there can be only one Jetpack?
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Oh, for some reason I assumed these salads were priced by weight. I need to go back to bed.
Maybe he has spotted a ham-arbitrage possibility.
I think it was Halford. No, wait. Cave people couldn't hunt the croutons.
The croutons maybe the result of regulatory distortions requiring salad to be composed of more than one substance.
2: Maybe he's interested in maximal value per dollar with the constraint of lactose intolerance.
"Honey, I'm as concerned about my health as you are. I promise, no more bacon, no more sandwiches, only salads for lunch."
3: ain't my birthday. And I can't imagine anybody on facebook who wasn't an unfogged person calling me that.
10: I was actually wondering if he was making some sort of bargain to himself about Wednesday being Salad-Bar Day. Which, if so, hey, I'm the last to judge. But it's fascinating to watch.
12: Maybe those were ingredients he needed for a recipe?
14: I have no idea why that's addressed to 12.
13: It's my unbirthday, too!
anybody... who wasn't an unfogged person
Shorter but less politically correct: "fogged person".
16: No matter many comments I write here, it will always be more accurate to describe me as fogged than unfogged.
He's celebrating the last day of Hanukah?
18: This seems relevant:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/12/why-i-love-america-part-86/67686/
Draining the pepper shaker into your carryout container is probably the best use of a by-the-pound salad bar if you are trying to maximize the cost of what you get.
Draining the pepper shaker
There's a euphemism for it I'd not previously encountered.
I have a horrible suspicion that the creator of the Ham-Ton may not realize that the salad bar is priced by weight, but thinks it's priced by container-size. Hence the filling up to the brim. (The generous sprinkling of croutons is for camouflage, lest anyone think he's trying to get away with something.)
24 to 23.
I really need to develop a better grasp of economics, so I can give short and convincing answers in situations like a few minutes ago when a professor just randomly wandered into my office and told me he's worried about inflation.
All this talk of salad bars is making me want a hard boiled egg.
26: If the fed or treasury could make inflation, they would as it would let them hide just how much people are losing on their houses and retirement funds. Since there is no inflation, you can be reassured that either our economy sucks so badly it can't be fixed or nobody in a position of authority understands how to run an economy.
Since there is no inflation, you can be reassured that either our economy sucks so badly it can't be fixed or nobody in a position of authority understands how to run an economy.
How reassuring.
They most certainly could make inflation. They choose not to.
30: True. I guess of was speaking of making inflation at a low-ish level that wouldn't spook the whole country.
Given that the near zero level of inflation currently has much of the country spooked, that does seem impossible.
That's why I invested in gold canned ham.
The Ham-Ton is a fine salad, but it can't compare to the Chinese Salad Tower.
Great. Now I want to eat my weight in ham cubes.
I wonder if I can estimate the weight and see if it could pay off. What would those containers hold, maybe three-by-eight-by-eight inches if converted to all right angles? And what, $6/lb?
On reflection I don't need the volume, just the per-weight cost and whether it is more or less than comparable store ham (probably more but maybe not by much).
Still, by the calculations I was doing, he would have gotten 192 cubic inches of ham, or 3146 cubic centimeters, making 3.1 kilograms according to Wolframalpha. Less for the space between the cubes, but still prodigious.
You'd also need the quality of the ham, since the per-weight cost of ham varies greatly.
Now I want to eat my weight in ham cubes.
Maybe Ham-Love will show up to commiserate.
One suspects that the quality of the ham cubes at the salad bar is fairly low.
I am full of suspicions today.
The problem with most ham is that it's not fatty enough. Which is why bacon is superior.
34. Never seen anything quite like that, but I know some people who in their impecunious youth would line the sides of a Pizza Hut salad bowl carefully with lettuce leaves to raise them by about three inches, then fill in the extended bowl, and finish off by balancing whole tomatoes up their forearms to the elbow.
No cashier ever questioned this,
And so the issue was left, hanging in the air, never to be resolved.
I have an otherwise (as far as I know) very honest acquaintance who routinely games the self-check-out of expensive-by-weight produce by ringing 'em up as potatoes or onions or whatever's cheap.
When I wanted a car, I switched the tags from the Impala with the tags from a Cobalt. The guy caught me at the last minute because he noticed the leather seats.
47: Couldn't they just sell bottled water for a much higher markup?
48: But then what would they do with all those pigs?
49: Keep all the bacon for themselves?
47: Interesting - that suggests it's a real-life Perfectly Competitive Market™ with only one major flaw, no?
Although I guess a PCM price would allow for ROI too.
I went to a salad place years ago in Switzerland and, not understanding German or having been there before, I did not understand the pricing. It turned out to be by dish size and I got frowned at for piling stuff up on a medium rather than large dish, which I did simply because I didn't notice there were larger dishes until I headed for the cash register.
It's fairly common, almost obligatory, to see people at Mongolian barbecue-style places pile things as high as they can in the bowl because they're usually "pay-by-the-bowl." Experts put a lot of effort into increasing density.
in Switzerland and, not understanding German
You say that as if understanding German were actually relevant in Switzerland.
Experts put a lot of effort into increasing density.
Just like urban planning.
Although I guess a PCM price would allow for ROI too.
I was just talking to a friend of mine from undergrad who now studies classics at Berkeley, specializing in ancient verse, and she told me about this really interesting-sounding didactic poem, a treatise on economics, which instructs the reader in how to run a profitable business. The first book addresses the all-too-common plight of the unsavvy business owner, of finding oneself short and not knowing the reason why; it's called "UBU ROI?".
58: I once worked in a building where the snack stands were staffed by blind people. They made bill readers for them to use at the cash register. The reader beeped once for a five, twice for a ten, thrice for a twenty, and maybe shouted "Hey, we got a baller" if you put in a hundred. Anyway, when they did the new twenties, it took a week or so to adjust the machines. In the meantime, the new twenty wouldn't make any beeps and it wasn't possible for the cashier to tell a one from a twenty. One person made use of this bug enough that they did a sting just to catch her.
It should have been "ubi", but I suck.
I wonder if mushrooms would be a better deal if I bought just what I needed by-the-pound from the salad bar. I never end up using the whole package of mushrooms anyway.
I have an otherwise (as far as I know) very honest acquaintance who routinely games the self-check-out of expensive-by-weight produce by ringing 'em up as potatoes or onions or whatever's cheap.
That must be why the self-checkout at my local supermarket yells out "move your potatoes (or whatever) to the belt." If you were actually ringing up raspberries there's a fair chance the lurking clerk/baggers would notice.
Not that I've thought much about this...
65: You, er, a person could checkout en español and hope for a monolingual anglophone cashier/bagger lurker.
Whole Foodz near work has no scales anywhere near the salad bar, so you just start piling things on and hoping you have not kelped your way into debtor's prison. I swear they hired some Organizational Behavior grad student to design containers that suggest, by their shape and color, that you might still be hungry if you don't have some more quinoa. Because I did, one day, somehow incur a $20 salad, or damn near.
66: Or, depending on the locale, draw more watchful eyes.
67: And now they've turned that business model to ice cream and frozen yogurt!
I'm not wondering about the provenance of the cubes of ham. Do they just go buy a ham at the store and cube it up? Do they get one of those big blocks of ham from the deli, except unsliced? I guess it could be spam, but that's a lot of spam, especially of Mr. Ham-Ton comes by once a day for his container's worth.
69 presents some interesting issues, but I too am not wondering about the provenance of the cubes of ham.
cubed spam doesn't look all that much like cubed ham, though, Satanley.
Eh, it isn't even a very funny mistake, sadly. Where's that autocorrect fauxpository?
69 presents some interesting issues
Indeed it does. It calls for diligent, searching investigation. Is girl27 around? I need an assistant.
That might mean either a storage place for les faux pas or something you put in your ass to make you put your foot in your mouth.
77: "Seitanly" might have been funny, given my dietary choices regarding meat. Try that one next time, TJ!
79 to 77. Certainly not 78.1. At least not the way I do it.
Continuing to not worry about ham cubes, Google led me to this, which isn't really enlightening but is terrifying.
83: Oh. Not even any pimiento?
I've started twice to write something about ham cubes, and have ditched the endeavor.
83: My mom used to make something similar involving slices of Buddig-brand beef slices, rolled up with cream cheese inside. It was a big treat.
60: I once worked in a building where the snack stands were staffed by blind people
In the 80s, when my father worked in the post office building, the snack stand was also staffed by the blind, but it was all on the honor system. I kinda assumed that they built a certain amount of extra shrinkage into their business plan.
67: Whole Foodz near work has no scales anywhere near the salad bar
I have a Whole Foodz management contact at a couple removes. I feel like I should try to be better friends with him so I could get the scoop on all the questions relating to WF that invariably arise in this forum. My question would be: How can it possibly be profitable to set up the Vitamins & Supplements aisle as a little maze that's impossible to navigate while keeping your sanity and composure?
69: Do they just go buy a ham at the store and cube it up? Do they get one of those big blocks of ham from the deli, except unsliced?
You know that any ham you've ever had in a sandwich at Subway, Quiznos etc. etc. comes from a gigantic cube of ham-and-water that the Sysco man drops off every week, right? It's solidified ham slurry, with paraffin.
You know that any ham you've ever had in a sandwich at Subway, Quiznos etc. etc. comes from a gigantic cube of ham-and-water that the Sysco man drops off every week, right? It's solidified ham slurry, with paraffin.
Grimace. Yeah, know that, pretty much. Ham cubes don't look much different.
It's solidified ham slurry, with paraffin.
Christ.
In unrelated news, I have crossed paths with two ex-girlfriends this week, which isn't over yet. Am I the only one who occasionally wonders whether the divinity behind the platypus is just fucking with him for fun?
I just got a jacket that's full of paraffin, but I don't think it has any ham in it.
I mean, except for me.
90: yes, I really don't think it has any ham in it.
When I was a kid my parents once decided that a huge pack of freeze dried ham cubes plus the standard Swedish bread/cracker stuff would be our lunch food for a long backpacking trip in the Wind Rivers. I'm pretty sure it was the slurry stuff in dehydrated form. It was very resistant to fully absorbing the water so it had a simultaneously gloppy and crunchy texture. But the scenery was pretty amazing.
You can tell a WASP by his fine ham jacket.
88: If you wonder whether there's a divinity involved, yes, you may be the only one.
Or, in another tone: fucking exes, how does that work?
In yet another tone: that's always awful troubling, Flip. Hope you got through it okay.
93 Is that what people mean when they talk about the 'pigskin' and the Ivy League?
88.2 mileage varies, but isn't fucking exes bound to make that elusive "closure" less likely?
isn't fucking exes bound to make that elusive "closure" less likely?
Yes.
TurJac, my need to answer 90 is not yet assuaged. Look: jackets all full of paraffin!
94: To assign to the divine the absurd is the only logic I feel capable of in such cases.
It wasn't all that troubling, really: I had a nice, friendly conversation with the first; the second (whose identity I suppose I can state about 80% confidence in, but it felt like plenty) and I ignored one another like mature adults, one of whom has had children with somebody else in the interim. I just thought she was, you know, the width of the fucking Atlantic (at least) away.
96: The past isn't even past.
Oh hell no. Those things are goofy looking. And they cost like a billion dollars. Mine is much more normal looking.
102: Aw, I have a nice old Barbour, just really breaking in after about 10 years. Not that warm, since I didn't spring for the snap-in lining. I guess I could still pick that up.
104: some of them are actually quite nice looking. But they're not the style of jacket I was looking for, and they truly are impressively expensive.
105: I bought mine at a decent exchange rate, from a UK store that was, in retrospect, not asking anywhere close to what Orvis or whatnot here demands.
101.2: I just thought she was, you know, the width of the fucking Atlantic (at least) away.
Oh. Yeah, that kind of thing can upend your day. Don't you feel like you should be ready to roll with anything that comes your way, no bother, nothing weird here? Of course you're (one is) rarely able to, at least in my reality. Not with something that unexpected, anyway.
Not quite Weehawken to Alameda, but.
Anyhow, the jacket I got is this one, by the people who make many other very, very silly items that I do not intend to by no matter how much "hilarious" spam they send me. But the jacket is pretty great.
the jacket I got is this one
I assumes it's able to dry the rain.
Don't you feel like you should be ready to roll with anything that comes your way, no bother, nothing weird here?
If I were giving myself advice, it would something along the lines of "Smile; speak if spoken to; pay a few compliments; go home and dive into a few fingers of the hard stuff; forget it," but that sort of Cary Grant/Connery's Bond/Dean Martin grace under pressure is actually pretty tough to pull off.
As for the Disco Pants, which Mr. Lindland calls "a nonstop sellout item for us," Betabrand has begun to detect "a sort of an unholy alliance of golfers and Burning Man people who have, like, officially made them their gear."
"Never before," he says, "have those communities been aligned over anything."
111: At first I thought you were starting on a variant of So you're gonna go out there, drink your drink, say "Goodnight, I've had a very lovely evening," go home, and jack off. And that's all you're gonna do.
114, ITYM "So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home and you cry and you want to diemasturbate".
I have no idea what *you* mean, neb, but feel free to share.
111: In some other reality, I might give myself that advice, but I'd not be the person I am if I lived it.
Reading the comment more closely: I don't call that grace under pressure. I call that -- the 'go home and forget it' portion -- superficial, unengaged. There would ultimately be nothing to see in such a person. And you don't want to be that man.
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You know what never gets any easier? Asking your parent(s) for money.
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113, 114: You brutes got no poetry in your souls, you know that?
All love demands a witness: something "there"
Which it yet makes part of itself. These two
Might find Carlton House Terrace, St Mark's Square,
A bit on the grand side. What about you?
52: That's interesting. But as unless I'm missing something unusual about your story, there's no particular reason to to attribute the margin to one specific component of production, even if the math works out neatly like that. Would non-watered-down ham would sell for more per pound?
If some other input to ham production were omitted or lowered in quality or otherwise disimproved, that would lower profit too (e.g. feeding the pigs a less efficient or more expensive food...). In principle, any subset of inputs that increase the value of output by 15% relative to cost can equally well be assigned responsibility for the whole margin.
Unless of course they were selling the ham for the same price as non-watered-down ham...
118: Doesn't it demand two witnesses? otherwise it's just he said/she said.
120: Passing up the easy Bishop Berkeley joke!
"Passing up" s/b 'missing" ... still. So you might want to recalibrate "easy".
It wouldn't have been that great a joke anyway, at least as I imagined it.
123: Kinda like my Beta Band joke in 110.
There are few online references, on a quick search, to the Kingsley Amis poem quoted in 118, which is apparently "Aberdarcy: The Main Square", but at least one puts forward the view that it's insulting.
Slow that down: there are few references to the first of the quoted lines, but once you determine the source, there's more, and then you can find some more stuff, and I guess this is something about class and Romanticism, or romanticism, going strictly from Google result skimming, shall I carry on in my investigations?
Only if it suits, only if it suits.
The class implications are probably due in large part to the quotation of the poem in Paul Fussell's much-maligned Class. I like the last stanza quite a bit more than the rest of the poem:
By the new Boots, a tool-chest with flagpoles
Glued on, and flanges, and a dirty great
Baronial doorway, and things like portholes,
Evans met Mrs. Rhys on their first date.
Beau Nash House, that sells Clothes for Gentlemen,
Jacobethan, every beam nailed on tight--
Real wood, though, mind you--was in full view when
Lunching at the Three Lamps, she said all right.
And he dropped her beside the grimy hunk
Of castle, that with luck might one day fall
On to the Evening Post, the time they slunk
Back from that lousy week-end in Porthcawl.
The journal of some bunch of architects
Named this the worst town centre they could find;
But how disparage what so well reflects
Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?
All love demands a witness: something 'there'
Which it yet makes part of itself. These two
Might find Carlton House Terrace, St Mark's Square,
A bit on the grand side. What about you?
--Kingsley Amis, 'Aberdarcy: The Main Square'
117: I haven't had to ask for any money, but I feel increasingly uncomfortable that I've been driving a car I borrowed from my parents for...a year. They don't seem to mind, and I've paid for a new fuel pump, some other minor maintenance, and a new state inspection. But still. It's theirs.
As it turns out, it looks like I don't actually have to ask my mom for money in this instance (assuming the refund check I've been waiting on comes through in the next day or two). Good thing, too, since when I called her earlier this evening to ask I couldn't bring myself to do it.
OT: Is there a thing with Facebook people sending each other shout-outs based on some number system? It's making for a weird newsfeed.
Not that I know of. What sort of number system?
The messages are like: "2309 - You've always been like a big sister to me. You're like ice cream and puppies and unicorns exploding in a double rainbow dot com in Wisconsin."
Nope, haven't seen anything like that.
127: I must say I still don't know what to make of it -- I read the thing in full a short while ago in googling. It's a ditty, almost; not the right term, but the right term escapes me. It's funny at points ("The journal of some bunch of architects"). It's rude at points ("And he dropped her beside the grimy hunk / Of castle").
I can find space for the notion that all love demands -- but, demands? no, rather, finds itself in the company of -- some witness, read broadly, which flavors it (it makes a part of itself). Sure. The final "What about you?" is nice, interesting.
130: Yes, one person I know is doing that. It seems the recipients (and no one else) are supposed to know who they are, but I have no idea how they know.
It sounds like a seekrit messaging system whereby people go by pseuds and say relatively contentless things like "You're like ice cream and puppies and unicorns exploding in a double rainbow dot com in Wisconsin."
I'd ignore it.
136: That was a very helpful comment. You're like ice cream...
I've paid for a new fuel pump, some other minor maintenance, and a new state inspection. But still. It's theirs.
Which suggests an interesting philosophical puzzle one might call Neurath's Parents' Boat.
Knecht, We all know that Fleur is awesome. Did you ever get her the karaoke set? Come January we need to have a party welcoming Bave to town.
God's fucking with your ex-girlfriends, Flippanter. You're just collateral damage.
God's fucking with your ex-girlfriends, Flippanter. You're just collateral damage.
139 made me laugh.
Thanks, that was basically my proudest accomplishment of the last month or two.
It seems the recipients (and no one else) are supposed to know who they are, but I have no idea how they know.
My students are alllll doing this gimmick. It makes for about as fascinating reading as reading someone else's yearbook inscriptions.