Can’t buy things you used to buy at a store where you usually look for somewthing? Well, if it wasn’t sufficiently profitable, as this article describes, it’s probably because the company that produced it stopped making it. Once again greed is shaping our culture. American society is dominated by greed, it is the only social priority that seems to matter. Wellbeing is rarely a factor.
Dollar General is cutting about 1,000 products from shelves. Credit: Scott Olson / Getty
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Pepperoni was getting out of hand at Hormel.
The food giant last year was selling 71 different versions of its Hormel Pepperoni brand. There was diced pepperoni. Turkey pepperoni. Mini-slices of turkey pepperoni. Pepperoni sticks. Pepperoni with 50% less sodium. Pepperoni with 25% less fat. Thick-sliced pepperoni. The list goes on.
But Hormel is removing, consolidating or repackaging 25% of the items as part of a company-wide strategy to prune unprofitable items across dozens of its brands like Spam, Applegate and Jennie-O, the company said in June. Around 80% of Hormel’s profit comes from a small number of products, like Hormel Bacon and Fire Braised-brand meats, while the rest of its tens of thousands of items often drive up costs and sit untouched in warehouses and on shelves for long periods.
Hormel is reviewing its product lineup to invest in items with higher profit margins, improve lower-performing items and “remove production complexity,” a spokesperson for […]
The scientists of the world who study the climate are screaming at the politicians, and you, that we are not doing anything close to what we should be doing to preserve human civilizations as they exist today. Your children, and their children are going to condemn us for this failure. In my remote viewing project it is clear that the civilization changing crisis will reach a peak in 15 years.
Existing policies and actions taken by world governments put the world on track for a median estimate of 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, Climate Action Tracker revealed on Thursday at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
If global leaders make no further effort to reduce emissions, temperatures have a 33% chance of spiking past 3°C of warming by 2100 and a 10% chance of overtaking 3.6°C, which report lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga called “an absolutely catastrophic level of warming.”
“The combined global effect of government action on climate change has flatlined over the last three years, underscoring a critical disconnect between the reality of climate change and the lack of urgency on policies to cut emissions,” Climate Action Tracker (CAT) announced during its annual update at COP29.
The report attributes the lack of progress to the fact that few governments announced new climate targets in 2024 while they continued to facilitate the increased burning of fossil fuels, despite the pledge made at last year’s COP28 to transition away from oil, gas, and coal.
If you think lettuce and cantaloupes are expensive now, as Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman explains, get prepared for prices to double. Trump’s deportation scheme every economist I have checked says is going to devastate the economy. All those Trump voters who thought he was going to “fix things” are about to learn how sensationally wrong their decision was. I think we are about to have the worst period in American history.
Economist Paul Krugman with President Joe Biden on August 14, 2023 Credit: Creative Commons
Donald Trump, during his 2024 presidential campaign, attacked the Biden Administration and Vice President Kamala Harris relentlessly over inflation.
Harris countered that Trump’s proposals — mass deportations and new tariffs on imported goods — would make inflation worse. Regardless, President-elect Trump enjoyed a decisive victory on Election Night 2024 and will begin his non-consecutive second term on January 20, 2025.
Liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his November 11 column for the New York Times, warns that grocery prices will soar if Trump follows through on his mass deportations plan.
“I’ve written about the likely inflationary impact of Donald Trump’s policies,” Krugman explains. “All of that still stands. But there’s an issue that I haven’t stressed as much as I probably should have: the specific effects of his proposed deportations on grocery and housing prices, both of which have been political flashpoints.”
According to Krugman, Trump’s “mass deportations” would “degrade productive capacity, balloon deficits and — yes — […]
If you have been watching the news today you are probably as outraged and disgusted as I am. What Trump is doing is straight out of the fascist playbook. To be an unchallenged authoritarian, you fire or dismiss anyone who might oppose you, and appoint only slavishly loyal incompetents who will do what they are told. SR isn’t big enough to do all the horror stories of these appointments Trump is trying to make. But I do emphatically note Trump doesn’t want them to go through the usual advise and consent confirmation process because that would mean the background and incompetencies of those people would become glaringly public. So the next thing to watch for is does the Senate recess, or do they stay in session and confirm or deny this scum from being confirmed. That will tell us what kind of Senate we are going to have for the next two years — or maybe longer.
U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat but is now a Republican, arrived at Philadelphia International Airport on September 10, 2024. Credit: Julia Beverly/Getty
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump continued to stoke global fears for the future on Wednesday by announcing more picks for top leadership positions in his next administration: former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Republican Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general.
The president-elect also confirmed his widely reported plan to name Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of state. The Associated Pressnoted that “the choices continued a pattern of Trump stocking his Cabinet with loyalists he believes he can trust to execute his agenda rather than longtime officials with experience in their fields.”
The announcements have provoked comparisons to blockbuster villains. One social media user quipped that “Trump’s Cabinet is shaping up like Dr. Evil’s collection of henchmen,” while Justin Jones—a Tennessee Democrat expelled from the state Legislature over […]
KARL MATHIESEN, Su Allan, and Clea Caulcutt, Staff Writers - Politico
Stephan:
Here is the best assessment of where humanity stands in relation to climate change that I have read. It is a mixed but basically a tragic story. The only way to deal with what is coming is single-focus international cooperation to end any use of carbon power, and to stop deforestation and pollution. It is going to take a whole range of new technologies and a commitment to fostering wellbeing from the individual to the planet. The governments of humanity just don’t seem to be able to get past greed. Greed is the destroying cancer of our species.
The last time Donald Trump entered the White House and menaced efforts to stop the climate from overheating, affronted world leaders closed ranks against him.
Such defiance and unity are practically unthinkable this time.
Trump’s peers are disunited, focused inward and have already largely abandoned the vanguard of the fight to stop the planet from burning up.
Their list of excuses, in fairness, contains many serious matters. Wars and trade disputes have eroded international cooperation. A pile-up of global and domestic challenges has pushed climate change down — or off — the agenda when world leaders meet. The European powerhouses that eagerly claimed the climate mantle after Trump’s 2016 election are now fumbling through a house of mirrors as they confront economic decline, populism and what French President Emmanuel Macron warns could be the failure of the EU project. Many of these problems, by the way, will likely become even more daunting during a Trump presidency.
Simply put, leaders are distracted. The global order of recent generations is crumbling. It is, lamented U.N. climate change chief Simon Stiell in a recent speech, a […]
