Hello! My name is Tara and I’m a senior at my high school in Illinois. I have been through a lot this year in the realm of school lunch improvement.
In November of 2009 I decided to take on our school lunch. I sent my first email to our school food provider (Aramark) in search of ingredient lists for our food. I thought it would be a very easy process to get this information, as I figured they were legally obligated to provide it to me.
To my surprise, after weeks I received no response. So, I contacted my district’s associate superintendent to let him know that Aramark wasn’t responding to my email requests. About a day later I got a response email from Aramark:
“Oh hey Tara! Your message had gotten sent to my spam folder.” Blah blah blah. —“Guest Blogger: Student concerned about ingredients,” Fed up With Lunch
Why is @ still where it’s at?
data–it’s fun!
celibacy: can’t we at least talk about it? absolutely not
Externalities is the term economists use when they talk about the side effects—or in the positive case, the spillover effects—of a business’s operations. They’re the impacts that a business has on its broader milieu, either directly or indirectly, but is not obliged to pay for or otherwise take into account in its decision making. The classic example is pollution: A smokestack in Akron may send particulates into the air that descend on farmlands downwind, but in the absence of any measurement of those, the factory isn’t charged for ensuing crop damage. Those effects are out of scope, and the company is off the hook. How a consumer disposes of your product at the end of its useful life is another form of externality, and so is the noise of your factory whistle. The concept of externalities goes beyond impacts on the physical environment. Say your menu-driven phone system keeps callers on the line a bit longer and eats up their minutes, or your subcontractor decides to cut costs by using undocumented workers, or property values near your facilities start to slide: Those are impacts for which you will likely not be called to account. —“The Big Idea: Leadership in the Age of Transparency,” Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby, Harvard Business Review
All I want for Christmas is my very own Traveling-Wave Reactor (TWR), which consumes depleted uranium as fuel (and that’s because I’m Bill Gates and I have everything else);
can’t Israel kill people with its own passports?
don’t let legal drugs make paupers of us all
We talked amiably over the phone a few times, but I never asked her out. Then one day, I came across an ad in the Village Voice for a workshop called “Erotic Bondage and Dirty Domination,” given by the adult sex shop Toys in Babeland. I was not involved in the BDSM scene — in fact, I’d never even considered bringing sex toys, far less weapons, into the bedroom. But I thought it would be a kind of anthropological adventure for Darla and me. It might speed up the expensive and psychically exhausting courtship ritual, and give us a shared experience to discuss. At the very least, it was more original than a bar or a club or a show. A friend of mine had just been to an S/M party, and returned swearing that everyone should try it. That night, I sent a text message to Darla, suggesting we attend…Minutes later, a text arrived: “Sounds fun!” —“My first date at the BDSM class,” Jed Lipinski, Salon
