Wal-Mart vs The Morons

PLEASE, READ THIS TO THE END. IT IS VERY INTERESTING! !!
Wal-Mart vs. The Morons
1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every
day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells
all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco + K-Mart
combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak
English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000
more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's
population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.
You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that
MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy.

This should be read and understood by all Americans Democrats, Republicans,
EVERYONE!!
To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature
It is now official that the majority of you are corrupt morons:

a.. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.
b.. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is
broke.
c.. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is
broke.
d.. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money
is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want
more..
e.. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
f.. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
g.. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence
on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while
overspending our tax dollars.

AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO
BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED
WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN
HEALTH CARE SYSTEM ??
Folks, keep this circulating. . It is very well stated. Maybe it will end up in the e-mails
of some of our "duly elected' (they never read anything) and their staff will clue them in on how Americans feel.
AND
I know what's wrong. We have lost our minds to "Political Correctness" !!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!

Someone please tell me what the HELL's wrong with all the people that run this
country!!!!! !We're "broke" & can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless
etc.,??????? ????

In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti , Chile , and Turkey .. And now Pakistan ......previous home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!
Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no aid nor do they get any breaks while
our government and religious organizations pour
Hundreds of Billions of $$$$$$'s and Tons of Food to Foreign Countries! We have hundreds of
adoptable children who are shoved aside to make room for the adoption of
foreign orphans.
AMERICA: a country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without 'needed' meds, and mentally ill without treatment -etc,etc.
YET......... ......... ....
They have a 'Benefit' for the people of Haiti on 12 TV stations, ships and planes lining up with
food, water, tents clothes, bedding, doctors and medical supplies.

Imagine if the *GOVERNMENT* gave 'US' the same support they give to other countries. Sad
isn't it?

99% of people won't have
the guts to forward this.
I'm one of the 1% -- I
Just Did

 

Ways to Lower Cholesterol

Dietary fiber

Pros: Dietary fiber—found in beans, fruits, and other foods—binds to cholesterol, lowering LDL levels by about 5%, Dr. Pearson says. "It fills you up and often doesn't have a lot of empty calories in it," he adds. "It could be called a modest addition to the therapeutic regimen." It's also cheap and easy, available at grocery stores.

Cons: Despite its availability, Americans seem to have a hard time getting enough fiber. Experts recommend 25 to 35 grams a day, yet most adults get only about 12 grams.

Exercise

Pros: Exercise is a great way to raise HDL. People who have had a heart attack can reduce their death risk by 25% with exercise compared with usual care, Dr. Pearson says. "Physical activity is an amazingly important behavior," he says. "You could argue that it's an absolutely essential part of either community or therapeutic regimens."

Cons: Exercise requires more effort than popping a pill, and communities often aren't set up to make it easier. "There's no place to walk; it's unsafe; you may get run over; there are crime issues," Dr. Pearson says. "We need to engineer our environments better."

Red yeast rice

Pros: This dietary supplement is derived from a fungus that grows in rice and contains small amounts of lovastatin (Mevacor). It can be effective in people who can't take statins, says Jacob Warman, MD, chief of endocrinology at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, in New York City. Although different people see different benefits, he says, "it always works to some extent."

Cons: Dietary supplements aren't tightly regulated in the United States the way drugs are, so there can be confusion about concentrations and proper dosages. A 2008 study found a 100-fold difference between the highest and lowest levels of monacolin among various supplement brands tested.

Low-fat diet

Pros: Choosing healthy food such as fish and veggies over red meat and french fries is relatively straightforward, and Dr. Warman estimates it could lower cholesterol by up to 20% in some people. Societies with low-fat diets, such as Japan and parts of the Caribbean, have lower levels of heart attack and stroke.

Cons: Much like exercise, it can be hard to eat a healthy diet consistently. Some people have to go all out—adopting a vegan diet free of animal products, for example—before they see any difference, Dr. Warman says. Diet changes may not be enough to trump genetics, so don't hesitate to switch strategies if your cholesterol won't budge.

 

"All of your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." -  ºoº Walt Disney ºoº  

 

Facebook makes us embrace creepy

Facebook makes us embrace creepy

Oct 19, 2011 16:50 EDT

By Kevin Kelleher
The opinions expressed are his own.

Sean Parker was looking edgy. Maybe it was because he was sitting in for Mark Pincus, who bowed out of this week's Web 2.0 Summit because of Zynga's pre-IPO quiet period. Or because this was a chance to show a large gathering of his peers that Justin Timberlake, no matter how smooth, could never be a Sean Parker. Or maybe it was just because he was Sean Parker.

He shifted nervously on a black leather sofa as he was asked about Facebook's new power, a power that leads many to see the company as fearsome and a little creepy. His posture hunched, his expression murine, his black wardrobe gothic porn, his eyes shifting around the room as he hunted for the precisely evasive word. Parker's reply finally came in the form of a couple of sentences that might stick with him for some time: "There's good creepy and there's bad creepy," he said. "Today's creepy is tomorrow's… necessity?"

It sounds so unpalatable coming from Sean Parker, but it's true. After all, more people are sharing more information on social networks than they were a few years ago. In a way, Parker was just channeling Zuckerberg, who said in early 2010 that people will grow more comfortable with sharing information about themselves; and more recently that people will want to share more of their lives as each year passes, and that "it's going to be really, really good."

But whatever Zuckerberg proclaims, Sean Parker oozes. And in that ooze lives a truth of Facebook that Zuckerberg – and any profitable social media – doesn't want you to know.

Parker, an early Facebook shareholder, said something that most of us don't want to admit to ourselves: We are learning to love Facebook's invasion of our private lives. We're learning to stop worrying that our faces, our thoughts, our conversations with family and friends – the little moments that accrete into our everyday lives – are becoming data-mining fodder for advertisers and anyone else Facebook forges a revenue-generating partnership with.

We are learning to love creepy. If we don't learn, we're going to be left out of the party. We won't know, for example, what our friends look like, in their far-flung residences, as they grow older. Or how adorable their kids are as they grow up. We won't know what they just read, or what movies they love, or what new artists they are listening to – unless we phone them up or sit down to lunch with them.

Which isn't bad … at first. But soon you soon start to feel like you're the 21st century Luddite buddy who has a weirdly obsessive need to hear news of your life in person, at lunch or whatever, rather than on Facebook. You're a beloved oddball at first. Then just an oddball. Then just the odd man out. It's not that you're crazy, or even creepy – it's that you're just not creepy enough. You still object to Facebook's advertisers and marketing partners collecting, sniffing and algorithmically analyzing every online confession of your personal life.

And yet, why shouldn't you feel that way? Online corporate snoopers may be getting smarter about you than you are about them. In 2010, a company called The Astonishing Tribe unveiled an app called Recognizr, which let you point an Android app at someone's face and learn – as fast as your mobile carrier will let you – the online personas they've created through public Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, and so on. Suddenly, your public self was much more publicly available that you had imagined.

More disturbingly, there are facial-recognition algorithms – developed under the adorably named yet still creepy (that is, bad creepy) PittPatt – which can scan a photo of you walking down the street and compare the pixels to a Facebook profile photo, and all the innocently adjacent data: birthday, birthplace, friends, family, political affiliation, etc. The things people take for granted are just the starting points of an investigation into the rest of their lives:

[I]t is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data 'accretion.' In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data – made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing – that we refer to as augmented reality.

So maybe Sean Parker is right. The necessary future is creepy. It used to be you applied for a job at a company, and some HR rep used a search engine to scour your past. Maybe, like most college students, you had our share of ungainly college moments; and maybe, like most college grads looking for work, you've deleted those terrible glories from the web.

But starting several years ago, your online life became something permanent. Anything you said, did, shared on a social network began to be preserved – according to the privacy policies of companies like Facebook – indefinitely. And it began to proliferate, into the databases of Facebook's partners.

In other words, our lives will be uploaded by, and observed by, and written on some server by, and remembered by some engineer who, at the end of the day, doesn't really know us, or who we are. Of course, most engineers won't care who we are. But what if that engineer isn't someone we trust? What if they just do what they're told, so they can get paid like the rest of us?

It's never been easier to express ourselves. We live in an era that demands self-publishing so much there must be something wrong with us if we don't. It's a great thing – except for one thing: We can't control what we publish, what we express. There is no deleting of ungainly moments anymore, there is just the power to counter those juvenile moments with more mature, adult perspectives. In a way, it's a lot like your high school or college friends who remember your youthful indiscretions – only now those memories belong to corporations as well. Friends forgive and forget, but corporate data mines never forget.

Managing who sees what data about you online is becoming an increasingly impossible task. The first 20 years of the web were about users expressing themselves, deciding what parts of their lives they published online. Increasingly your online identity belongs to a company like Facebook or Google. You either deal with that creepy fact, or you just don't exist online.

PHOTO: Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker gestures during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, California October 17, 2011. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

 

 

"All of your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them." -  ºoº Walt Disney ºoº