Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….Kids’ Birthday Parties Are Out of Hand

1. The money spent on birthday parties is insane. It’s not uncommon for parents to drop $500 on a party and all the “necessary” entertainment such as clowns and activities.

2. Loot bags are literally loot bags, stuffed with all kinds of items that could be considered gifts as opposed to thank you trinkets.

3. The money spent on presents keeps going up. The idea of spending $10 on a modest gift is a non-starter given everyone else is spending $30, $40 or $50 on a gift. Of course, the child receiving the gift will often turf the gift to play with the box that it came in.

4. It’s no longer enough to put on a birthday party that features traditional games such as pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs or egg races. Now, you’ve got to go to some kind of adventure or activity centre that has all kinds of things to do. It’s not a cheap thing to do, and most children are overwhelmed rather than overjoyed.

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…Food Aid Is Facing The Perfect Storm

1. The perfect economic storm seems to be in full swing. The U.S. housing market is in the tank, oil prices are soaring, and the credit crisis is paralyzing the banking world. While economists debate whether the U.S. is in the midst of a recession, people from all walks of life are finding it harder to make ends meet. Factor in surging food and gas prices and you will find more people in need of food aid.

2. The number of people in need is staggering. USA Today points out that government data for 2006 (the latest available) shows 10.9% of households were food insecure, “a bureaucratic term meaning they did not have enough food for a healthy lifestyle at some point in the year.” That’s 35.5 million people! Of these, 22.9 million are adults (10.4% of all adults) and 12.6 million are children (17.2% of all children). At 21.8% and 19.5%, Black and Hispanic households, respectively, experience the highest rates of food insecurity.

3. Demand for food aid is on the rise. According to the U.S. Department of Agricultural, 26 million people participate in the food stamps program, with working class families accounting for approximately 41% of those in 2006, up from 30% tens years earlier. Second harvest, the largest network of food banks in the U.S., says demand is up an average of 15% to 20% from a year ago.

4. Donations are down. In addition to reduced personal and corporate sponsorship, federal government donations have been on the decline (though should show signs of recovery now that the Farm Bill has been passed by the House of Representatives).

5. Behind the strength of food and commodity prices, farmers are selling crops on the open market as opposed to government, price-supported programs. This creates additional pressure on food banks as those that purchase food to supplement donations are facing much higher costs. In a recent survey of Second Harvest food banks, over 80% reported that they could not meet demand without trimming operations or reducing the amount of food given out.

If you are interested in making a donation, please visit Second Harvest (for U.S. donations) and The Daily Bread Food Bank (Canada). Also, please feel free to post other sites in the comments.

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….We Need Three-Day Weekends

1. Two days is simply not enough time to recover from the work week AND get ready for the following work week. After you’ve done the laundry, cleaned the house and shopped for groceries, it leaves little time for important things like relaxing, drinking wine, watching television and taking naps. But if there was a three-day weekend, you could do all your laundry, shopping and cleaning, AND have plenty of time left for the good stuff.

2. A two-day weekend means that 71.4% of the work is consumed by work. That hardly seems reasonable or fair because it means non-work time is totally overshadowed by time spent working for the MAN..or WOMAN.

3. If more people worked four-day weeks, more employment opportunities created. Think about it, if we all worked 20% less a week, someone would have to make up for that 20%. It would be win-win. Another person would get to work and, more important, you would get to work less.

4. It would make most people more productive. If you had to do all your work in four days rather than five, then you would really need to focused and hard working. Instead of wasting time drinking coffee, surfing the Web, bidding on eBay and going for long lunches, you would need to work harder because you knew that three days of vacation were the reward.

5. With a three-day off, four-day on schedule, it would reduce overall stress in society. We’d all be nicer, more civilized and relaxed people. It would be good for society as a whole in addition to good for individuals.

More: If five reasons for a four-day work week aren’t enough, check out The Oil Drum, which lists 16 reasons why it’s time for a four-day work week. I particularly like #16 - “The 4 Day Work Week feels great!”. For more on the four-day work week, check out Ryan Carson’s post looking at the “Four-Day Work Challenge”.

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…Wine, It’s All In Your Head

1. At the end of the day, you like what you like. While there are innumerable magazines, countless experts and friends who fancy themselves oenophiles, once you pull out the cork only you can be the real judge of whether a wine is any good. While ratings and price are usually closely connected and often are important to trained wine drinkers/collectors, personal taste should be the ultimate factor in choosing what to drink.

2. Wine drinking, or more importantly “tasting”, is like any skill. Training changes your relative perception of what is good. In other words, you like what you know…or don’t know. In his book, “The Wine Trials,” Robin Goldstein shows that novice wine drinkers have significantly different, and cheaper, tastes than wine experts (those who have had some sort of training or professional experience). This explains why, in the study of mostly novice wine drinkers, a $10 bottle of sparkling wine from Washington state outscored a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon, while Two-Buck Chuck topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.

3. Unfortunately, personal taste is often swayed by emotion. And we can blame marketing for bringing emotion into the fold. Case in point - critter labels. What’s a critter label? Have you ever seen a wine bottle with a cat, dog, hippo or penguin? Now you know. An ACNielson survey conducted in 2006 showed that 18% of all wine bottles had an animal on them and accounted for over $600 million in sales in the U.S. I can’t even imagine how those numbers have changed over the last two years. Another study conducted in New York showed that a critter label can provide a 20% in sales versus a non-critter wine, and they are particularly popular among women shoppers.

4. An experiment by the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they take in drinking it. As the New York Times notes, “The fact is, the correlation between price and quality is so powerful that it affects not just our perception of wine but of all consumer goods.”

5. While scoring has helped us develop a sense of relative taste (”Look, honey. Parker scored this a 91!”), Eric Asimov of the New York Times points out that wine, or the enjoyment of it, is contextual - your enjoyment depends on where you are and who you are with. Asimov notes, “The proverbial little red wine, so delicious in a Tuscan village with your sweetie, never tastes the same back home in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the big California cabernet, which you enjoyed so much with your work buddies at a steakhouse, ties tucked between buttons, doesn’t have that triumphant lift with a bowl of spaghetti.”

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….Recycling is Badly Flawed

1. Too much of the stuff that is diligently thrown in recycling boxes isn’t recycled. Many of the plastics (other than yogurt and margarine tubs, juice and laundry detergent containers) are sent to the dump as opposed to be recycled. And most, if not all, the glass isn’t recycled because the different colored-glass is mixed together, which makes it useless other than being used for doing things such as building roads.

2. There’s too much emphasis on recycling as opposed to re-use. Remember when you had to take your pop and milk bottles back to the store for a deposit. Most of those bottles were re-used as opposed to trucked to a sorting facility where an army of pickers has to go through it all.

3. There’s still way too much that isn’t recycled at all or that much. Styrofoam, for example, still goes right into the garbage even though manufacturers continue to pump out mountains of it every day. It should also be easier to recycle plastic. Think of all the plastic bags that could be used again if there they were collected as opposed to thrown into the garbage after a single use.

4. The energy, cost and time involved to recycle often outweighs the benefits. Think, for example, of all the fuel burned as trucks prowl around collecting household recycling. How efficient or environmentally friendly is that?

More: In this video, Penn and Teller talk about how recycling is “just plain bullshit”.

Technorati Tags: Recycling

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