Hello all. It's been a LONG time since I did anything with Everyday Radical, but I feel like it's overdue given this past month.
The goal of Everyday Radical was to collect little things you could do to disengage from economic systems that force us to feed money into companies/economic structures that we may not agree with. It may not seem like much but learning how to make a solid vegetable stew from scratch, or a home made batch of mustard means you can stop consuming so much plastic, you can much more easily avoid spending money with companies that have sketchy hiring practices, or sketchy environmental records, or that take political action you are opposed to. It is very possible that over the course of the next several years we will see the erosion of regulation on a scale we haven't witnessed in a very long time. While I do not believe that "principled economic action" will ever replace government regulation, when you have a limited set of tools available to you, you have to work three times as hard to make the tools you have get the job done. It doesn't mean you don't get the job done.
So with that in mind I'm going to try to post something to this blog, or the corresponding Facebook page at least a few times a week. A lot of it will probably be recipe re-shares, or just short ideas that I will try to frame with a few words about how they can help us disengage from damaging systems, but I want to get back to this idea.
With that in mind I'm going to kick it off with a somewhat longer post about an observation that's been bothering me recently. We need to stop paying affluence tax. I am defining affluence tax here as the money we pay not necessarily for higher quality products or value, but so that we appear to be of a certain socio economic status, and in many cases that will specifically mean appearing appropriately "white". I have seen this most dramatically around food consumption, but it exists everywhere.
Over the past year I have mostly stopped shopping at mainstream grocery stores. I occasionally go to the Jewel Osco in my Neighborhood to get an odd item I can't find elsewhere, and very VERY rarely I will venture into a Whole Foods to get an especially obscure cheese or piece of meat, but those trips are down to maybe once every three months or so. My grocery shopping primarily takes place at Aldi's or a medium sized neighborhood grocery down the block from where I live. The rarity of my megamart visits has brought something into stark contrast for me. There is a massive markup on the food in the megamarts, and the only value you get for that markup is being seen shopping at "the right kind of store". You get more well lit aisles, and you get a nice convenient servant to bag your groceries for you, and the prestige of not being seen shopping somewhere you might have to do your own bagging.
The other thing you get is the "advantage" of being seen shopping where other white people shop. I've reached the point where the people who work at my local corner mart recognize me and are happy to see me, but when I first started shopping there I stood out like a sore thumb, and there was a certain amount of distrust I experienced, which having observed the behavior of other white people in this grocery I have to say was more than a little justified. The dynamic at Aldi's wasn't nearly as stark, and due to Aldi's volume no one recognizes me, but I am aware that my whiteness puts me in the minority of people who shop at Aldi's, at least the one in Uptown.
A month or so ago I stopped in at Jewel because it was on my way back from getting coffee with a friend and I figured I'd just grab some sandwich makings to have around the house since we were low. Literally everything I bought was twice the price of the same products at the corner grocery, and honestly was of questionably quality. This was deli counter product and I was kind of furious, not only at the general ripoff, but the sudden realization of what people were willing to pay to be pampered and treated as though they were in a certain class, which just happens to be more prominently white. I have been far FAR less willing to spend my money at mainstream groceries, and even less so at grocers like Whole Foods since this experience.
Given what's happening in America right now we should absolutely do work to adjust our perceptions so we see this deference to our privilege/whiteness where it lives and reject it. I've seen a lot of people ask "what can I do?" in response to the sudden realization that we may need to be fighting the good fight moving forward. If you aren't the kind of person who sees themselves marching in the streets then rebel with your pocketbook. Shop at a grocery store owned by and tailored to people who aren't privileged and white. If you are lucky enough to make a solid income don't accept the societal deference that leads us to make sure that money stays with people of our class and color. Break that economic chain as hard as you possibly can, and leave the privilege of being coddled behind when you walk into a store that isn't designed for you. Walk in those places with an understanding that you are not the center of that experience and make a choice to be fine with that. Trust me, you don't actually need all that deference. The people who work at and own the local Latin, Vietnamese, pan-Asian, etc. grocery can use your green, and once you break yourself of the notion that 4.99 is an appropriate price for a can of cold brew coffee (a thing I actually saw recently) you won't miss the luxuries of mainstream shopping that much.
If you aren't lucky enough to live in an area with less mainstream grocery options you can do the same work by buying sane brands, by shopping at local food marts, local restaurants not tailored to luxury, and just generally patronizing businesses owned and operated by and for communities other than upper middle class white folks. It makes a difference, even if only one bag of groceries of lunch at a time.
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Friday, October 5, 2012
Why Taxes Promote Job Growth!!! AKA WTF MITTENS?!?!?!
Ok, so I have been continually confused by the ramblings on the Republican side of the aisle about how increasing the top tax brackets will "stifle job growth". This is patently absurd, though it unfortunately sounds good on the surface. If you want to look at the actual data this little blog post wraps it together very nicely.
Ok, so I posted another blog post that shows the data, what more could I possibly have to say. Well here's the thing, the blog post I put up shows correlation. It assumes causation, but it doesn't go the extra mile of explaining why taxing the every living crap out of the "job creators" would create GDP growth, which in general creates jobs. To me it makes perfect sense that higher tax rates would increase job growth and reinvestment by business and that's what I want to talk about.
So first I need to let you in on a secret. It's a well kept secret, and it has been kept in the way that all great secrets are kept, out in the open. Here it comes . . . you only pay taxes on profits.
Well there's the secret. Somehow it's been left out of the conversation. The other half of the secret is that you don't pay taxes on the money you pay to your workers because that's an expense. Now it is important to point out here that "the money you pay your workers" includes some "tax" expenses. Payroll tax and whatnot, but that's honestly treated as part of the calculated "salary" expense. So for our purposes I'm going to treat that as part of the salary. I will not treat it the same way income tax is treated, as so many politicians have been doing recently.
So now a bit on "owning a company" and other forms of wealth. Most of Americans think of wealth in 1 term, money, which at it's core money is wealth, but it's only 1 form of it. The other primary form of wealth is "ownership". This can be ownership of a company, a house, a car, you name it. The two major forms of wealth we tend to measure in our society aside from money are property, such as a house or an apartment building, and company holdings. In fact these two forms of wealth are were the very rich have most of their resources. It doesn't make sense to keep your resources as cash, because then over time as inflation continues it's inevitable climb your money becomes less and less valuable. However, a company continues to gain in value because the goods and services that they sell are worth more and more money over time, due to the same inflation that makes your stationary money less and less valuable. Property similarly becomes more valuable over time and inflation continues to rise and houses, office buildings, and condominiums sell for more and more money.
One more quick piece of background. Profit equals income minus expenses. That's what's taxed. If you bring in 2 billion in revenue, and spend 1 billion just keeping the doors open and the lights on you don't pay taxes on 2 billion. You only pay taxes on the 1 billion that's left.
So I've laid all this groundwork, what does any of it have to do with high taxes creating job growth? Here's the thing. Wealth is not taxed. Wealth is very difficult to measure, money is very easy to measure. We only tax profits. So say you own a business, and it's doing very well. Let's say based on your projections you're going to bring in 1 million dollars in profits by the end of the year. Now let's say the tax rate is very low on all tax brackets. 0% for the first 8 grand, 10% up to 100 grand, and 25% on everything you make over 250 grand. So you have two choices, you can take the money home as profit, or you can spend that money to grow your business. If you grow your business then you'll be spending it out as expenses. It will no longer be counted as profits. This is the easiest way to avoid paying taxes, just spend out all your money growing your business. Sounds great, your business gets bigger, your wealth still increases, but you don't pay any taxes on that wealth. You can sell your incredibly huge business when you're ready to retire, and live like a fat cat. The thing is, growing your business is risky. What if a market you decide to get into collapses, or you are just never able to provide services as reliable as your competitors? If you just grow for the sake of growth, and don't look carefully at the market's your trying to expand in it can all result in a ton of wasted wealth. So you are obviously going home that first 250,000 bucks as profit. However, the risks associated with growing your business are likely high enough that in most cases it's probably a better bet take the remainder of the money as profit as well and call it a fiscal year. There might be a few incredibly safe bets you'll be willing to take in the realm of expanding your business, but not many.
Now imagine the same scenario where the top tax bracket is 40-50%. That changes things considerably. If you take your income above $250,000 as profit then you will pay quite a bit of it to the federal government. However, when you look at your business opportunities they don't have to pay off nearly as well to be a better bet than taking the profit home. A business person in this scenario is much more inclined to reinvest in the business, or take business lunches, and business trips, and any other thing that can write off as an expense. Setting hiring aside for a moment, even the extravagance of business spending in a high tax environment serves a stimulative purpose. Individuals who are very wealthy tend to spend a much smaller portion of their income than the very poor, because once all your needs are taken care, everything else is discretionary. However, if it's take the business dinner as an expense, or pay taxes on that money as income most people will take the business dinner. That means more money going into the economy that otherwise may have been reserved our of "prudence".
Now lets picking hiring up from where we set it aside. Unlike the extra business dinners and travel this is a direct investment situation. If you look at your high tax rate and decide that it makes more sense to open a new store in a new market complete with additional administrative staff, and retail staff, and construction contractors to set the store up instead of walking home with profits then you have additional jobs, and a directly stimulative effect on the economy. "Job Creators" are far more likely to take these steps if the alternative is to take home a payout that has been cut severely by taxes. This isn't brain surgery, but it does require a little bit of additional thought to see.
Increasing taxes on poor people directly slows down the economy because the poor spend everything they have anyway just to survive. Raising taxes on the rich speeds up the economy because they want to convert that money to non currency forms of wealth to avoid paying taxes on their income. Where the line changes is messy and complicated, and I don't pretend to know exactly where we would want to ask for more cash. I personally would like to see our highest tax bracket increase, and I'd like to see an additional tax bracket added for people who make well in excess of a million a year. How these changes would effect the spending patterns of the middle class is far less certain to me, as much of how they approach their individual monetary policy varies by individual, and I would love to see the politicians really hash out where this phenomenon starts and stops. First they would have to admit it even exists.
Ok, so I posted another blog post that shows the data, what more could I possibly have to say. Well here's the thing, the blog post I put up shows correlation. It assumes causation, but it doesn't go the extra mile of explaining why taxing the every living crap out of the "job creators" would create GDP growth, which in general creates jobs. To me it makes perfect sense that higher tax rates would increase job growth and reinvestment by business and that's what I want to talk about.
So first I need to let you in on a secret. It's a well kept secret, and it has been kept in the way that all great secrets are kept, out in the open. Here it comes . . . you only pay taxes on profits.
Well there's the secret. Somehow it's been left out of the conversation. The other half of the secret is that you don't pay taxes on the money you pay to your workers because that's an expense. Now it is important to point out here that "the money you pay your workers" includes some "tax" expenses. Payroll tax and whatnot, but that's honestly treated as part of the calculated "salary" expense. So for our purposes I'm going to treat that as part of the salary. I will not treat it the same way income tax is treated, as so many politicians have been doing recently.
So now a bit on "owning a company" and other forms of wealth. Most of Americans think of wealth in 1 term, money, which at it's core money is wealth, but it's only 1 form of it. The other primary form of wealth is "ownership". This can be ownership of a company, a house, a car, you name it. The two major forms of wealth we tend to measure in our society aside from money are property, such as a house or an apartment building, and company holdings. In fact these two forms of wealth are were the very rich have most of their resources. It doesn't make sense to keep your resources as cash, because then over time as inflation continues it's inevitable climb your money becomes less and less valuable. However, a company continues to gain in value because the goods and services that they sell are worth more and more money over time, due to the same inflation that makes your stationary money less and less valuable. Property similarly becomes more valuable over time and inflation continues to rise and houses, office buildings, and condominiums sell for more and more money.
One more quick piece of background. Profit equals income minus expenses. That's what's taxed. If you bring in 2 billion in revenue, and spend 1 billion just keeping the doors open and the lights on you don't pay taxes on 2 billion. You only pay taxes on the 1 billion that's left.
So I've laid all this groundwork, what does any of it have to do with high taxes creating job growth? Here's the thing. Wealth is not taxed. Wealth is very difficult to measure, money is very easy to measure. We only tax profits. So say you own a business, and it's doing very well. Let's say based on your projections you're going to bring in 1 million dollars in profits by the end of the year. Now let's say the tax rate is very low on all tax brackets. 0% for the first 8 grand, 10% up to 100 grand, and 25% on everything you make over 250 grand. So you have two choices, you can take the money home as profit, or you can spend that money to grow your business. If you grow your business then you'll be spending it out as expenses. It will no longer be counted as profits. This is the easiest way to avoid paying taxes, just spend out all your money growing your business. Sounds great, your business gets bigger, your wealth still increases, but you don't pay any taxes on that wealth. You can sell your incredibly huge business when you're ready to retire, and live like a fat cat. The thing is, growing your business is risky. What if a market you decide to get into collapses, or you are just never able to provide services as reliable as your competitors? If you just grow for the sake of growth, and don't look carefully at the market's your trying to expand in it can all result in a ton of wasted wealth. So you are obviously going home that first 250,000 bucks as profit. However, the risks associated with growing your business are likely high enough that in most cases it's probably a better bet take the remainder of the money as profit as well and call it a fiscal year. There might be a few incredibly safe bets you'll be willing to take in the realm of expanding your business, but not many.
Now imagine the same scenario where the top tax bracket is 40-50%. That changes things considerably. If you take your income above $250,000 as profit then you will pay quite a bit of it to the federal government. However, when you look at your business opportunities they don't have to pay off nearly as well to be a better bet than taking the profit home. A business person in this scenario is much more inclined to reinvest in the business, or take business lunches, and business trips, and any other thing that can write off as an expense. Setting hiring aside for a moment, even the extravagance of business spending in a high tax environment serves a stimulative purpose. Individuals who are very wealthy tend to spend a much smaller portion of their income than the very poor, because once all your needs are taken care, everything else is discretionary. However, if it's take the business dinner as an expense, or pay taxes on that money as income most people will take the business dinner. That means more money going into the economy that otherwise may have been reserved our of "prudence".
Now lets picking hiring up from where we set it aside. Unlike the extra business dinners and travel this is a direct investment situation. If you look at your high tax rate and decide that it makes more sense to open a new store in a new market complete with additional administrative staff, and retail staff, and construction contractors to set the store up instead of walking home with profits then you have additional jobs, and a directly stimulative effect on the economy. "Job Creators" are far more likely to take these steps if the alternative is to take home a payout that has been cut severely by taxes. This isn't brain surgery, but it does require a little bit of additional thought to see.
Increasing taxes on poor people directly slows down the economy because the poor spend everything they have anyway just to survive. Raising taxes on the rich speeds up the economy because they want to convert that money to non currency forms of wealth to avoid paying taxes on their income. Where the line changes is messy and complicated, and I don't pretend to know exactly where we would want to ask for more cash. I personally would like to see our highest tax bracket increase, and I'd like to see an additional tax bracket added for people who make well in excess of a million a year. How these changes would effect the spending patterns of the middle class is far less certain to me, as much of how they approach their individual monetary policy varies by individual, and I would love to see the politicians really hash out where this phenomenon starts and stops. First they would have to admit it even exists.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Quick Tip: More on Condiments/Mustard
Ok Ok Ok. So I've been at a professional conference all week, and I haven't been stellar about doing daily tips every day anyway. Soooo, I'm going to change the term to quick tip and get them up as often as possible. Life has a way of getting in the way. So onto the tips.
So the last post was about vinegar. There are in fact several other condiments you can make for yourself and cut out the middle man. The simplest is probably mustard. Buy some mustard seed (NOT Ground, trust me on this. You really don't want to grind the mustard before making your mustard). Now put the mustard seed in a sealed container with vinegar overnight. This is why you don't use ground. Were you to grind it right away it would be REALLY hot mustard. The soaking mellows the mustard's spicy sharpness considerably. I've always eyeballed this, but I figured for this post I'd get some ratios for people. 5 tablespoons to about a half cup of vinegar is pretty good. You can go any vinegar for this, the home made from the last tip is nice. You can mix in other stuff like wine or probably even beer. The trick is to keep it at least half pickling quality vinegar. The recipes I've seen say this keeps for 2 weeks. That's hogwash. I've talked with people who make mustard and have checked on this. As long as your liquid is at least 50% pickling quality vinegar then you're dealing in microbially hostile acidity levels. If you use all vinegar honestly it keeps . . . well practically forever in the fridge. I recommend making batches of the stuff and keeping it in small jelly mason jars. It works beautifully.
Way cheaper than store bought if you can find a bulk source for the mustard seed (read: Sam's club or online), and you can do whatever you want with the flavoring. Also a nice way to make something snazzy with that half a glass of white wine left over that you really aren't sure what to do with.
So the last post was about vinegar. There are in fact several other condiments you can make for yourself and cut out the middle man. The simplest is probably mustard. Buy some mustard seed (NOT Ground, trust me on this. You really don't want to grind the mustard before making your mustard). Now put the mustard seed in a sealed container with vinegar overnight. This is why you don't use ground. Were you to grind it right away it would be REALLY hot mustard. The soaking mellows the mustard's spicy sharpness considerably. I've always eyeballed this, but I figured for this post I'd get some ratios for people. 5 tablespoons to about a half cup of vinegar is pretty good. You can go any vinegar for this, the home made from the last tip is nice. You can mix in other stuff like wine or probably even beer. The trick is to keep it at least half pickling quality vinegar. The recipes I've seen say this keeps for 2 weeks. That's hogwash. I've talked with people who make mustard and have checked on this. As long as your liquid is at least 50% pickling quality vinegar then you're dealing in microbially hostile acidity levels. If you use all vinegar honestly it keeps . . . well practically forever in the fridge. I recommend making batches of the stuff and keeping it in small jelly mason jars. It works beautifully.
Way cheaper than store bought if you can find a bulk source for the mustard seed (read: Sam's club or online), and you can do whatever you want with the flavoring. Also a nice way to make something snazzy with that half a glass of white wine left over that you really aren't sure what to do with.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Daily Tip: Make Your Own Vinegar
So I was just going to do a condiment post, but this one ended up a bit monstrous. So I'm doing it on it's own and I'll post others later. My focus is going to be on products that are overpriced and not particularly high quality in the grocery store.
White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).
So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.
Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.
Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.
If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.
So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.
Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.
I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.
White Wine Vinegar: This isn't exactly a sandwich condiment, but some people use a ton of vinegar in their cooking. I am one of those individuals. Store bought white wine vinegar is in fact mostly distilled. It's for lack of a better description over priced crap. You can make your own with some mason jars, a little cheesecloth, a bunch of cheap white wine, and a little starter (a small bottle of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar in our case).
So first a word about cheesecloth. This product is crazy expensive in the grocery store. I suggest buying it in bulk. It might seem like a big investment, but if you're going to start doing things on your own in the kitchen more regularly you'll find it very worth it. I use cheesecloth ALL THE TIME. If I had to buy it in the store I'd have filed for bankruptcy by now.
Next on choosing white wine. The huge jugs, or the boxed wine will do. When I first looked up how to do this all the guides said "pick a wine you would drink, because the better the wine the better the vinegar". This is true, but not true enough. The vinegar I've made from cheap boxed wine is excellent. As in some of the best vinegar I've ever had, because we're all used to the mostly distilled waste passed off as wine vinegar in the grocery. As this blog is about being self sufficient and doing for yourself I am NOT going to recommend that you go out and get snooty wine to intentionally spoil. That's just silly.
Now to make the vinegar. Start by running your mason jars and rings through the dishwasher with a hot dry. Then take them out while they are still hot and fill them 80% of the way with your wine. Between the alcohol in the wine, and the acid in the vinegar it will become this is all the sterilization I've ever needed. Now put enough apple cider vinegar in each jar to leave about an inch of air space. Now take a few layers of cheesecloth and lay it over the top of the jar and put your rings on. There, the work is done. Put the jars in the back of a cabinet somewhere and forget about them for . . . oh say 3 months. (Hey it's easy, I didn't say it was fast) Take the vinegar out and test it by tasting a little. If it doesn't taste and smell enough like vinegar put it back and check once a month for flavor. When it's how you want it replace the cheesecloth with mason jar lids. Technically at this point it's a living breathing thing. So if you blast through vinegar at a rapid rate then you are in fact done. It will be good for probably 6 months this way, give or take depending on conditions. (I won't lie that's me being conservative and not wanting to give bad advice. I've kept this type of vinegar longer than 6 months, but I don't know for sure how long it will last. So be careful if you try to go longer) If you use it in raw applications like salad dressings then the live culture is quite good for you. It will be cloudy, and will never settle if you leave it alive. If you want to keep the vinegar for more than a year then you want to give the sealed mason jars a 10 minute boiling water bath, make sure the water doesn't reach the rings. If you really want it to keep there is a process for adding sulfides to the vinegar to extend it's shelf life, but I've never done that and used my vinegar for up to a year or so past when it finished brewing. So I don't recommend it, the sulfides aren't really good for you anyway.
If you boil the vinegar then the particulate will start to settle and you'll eventually be able to "decant" the clear vinegar off the sediment. There is nothing bad about the sediment, but the clear vinegar does have a cleaner taste, and is more attractive if you care about such things.
So some background on why you take some of the steps you take. The vinegar requires oxygen to brew. So the cheesecloth let's oxygen in, while keeping dust and other nasties out of the liquid. I tried a few other approaches and I found that the brewing just took way too long. Using the cheesecloth approach I was able to brew the vinegar much faster than trying to keep it in bottles.
Second a word on pickling. If you follow specific pickling recipes I do not recommend using this vinegar. Pickle recipes are carefully calibrated around a specific acidity, and that acidity is necessary to make the preservation safe. That said if you are willing to go out and buy some ph test strips you can play the chemistry game of getting your vinegar to the exact same acidity as distilled from the store and going from there. Because I don't use specific pickling recipes when I pickle I just make sure that my vinegar is more acidic than distilled (which I keep around for cleaning purposes) and go from there. I test this by weighing out a set amount of baking soda on my scale and then using a dropper I put drops of distilled vinegar on the pile of baking soda till I get a drop that does not react. I then do the same thing with my home made vinegar, and if the reaction doesn't stop happening faster with my home made vinegar then I let my acid keep brewing. It's not precise, but as long as my vinegar is more acidic than distilled then I know I'm in safe territory. Also, because it's brewed and not distilled even at higher acidity it has a more delicate flavor. So I don't have to worry about overpowering myself. If you want to use your vinegar for pickling you MUST take the pasteurizing step of running your vinegar through a water bath. The live culture will do all sorts of strange things to the pickling process.
I know this was a long post, but a lot of people love my vinegar, and I wanted to share. I know this might seem like a lot of work, but you never take more than a couple steps on any given day. It's mostly just about patience. I guarantee you'll never buy vinegar from the store again.
Monday, November 7, 2011
What does the Everyday Radical Stuff Really Accomplish Anyway?
So every time that I go to post one of my little "Radical Anarchist Martha Steward" pieces of advice something in me wonders if what I'm trying to say really comes across. So I figured I'd write a little bit about the very layperson economics of what I'm trying to accomplish, and a little bit about my feelings on the subject in terms of what's happened to us over the last couple generations and how to fix it.
First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.
The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.
First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.
The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.
Next are the taxes. The first are government taxes. Really in the US this is state and in some cases city or county sales tax. There isn't much to say about these taxes. Really all fairly straight forward.
The final portion is the corporate tax rate. This is the portion of the price of your purchase that goes to credit card fees. Even if you only shop with cash there is still a corporate tax because early experiments with charging people who use credit cards more for the portion of the transaction that the banks take off the top failed. So stores include the credit card charges in their overall prices and average it out across all their sales.
No one of these expenses is necessarily good or bad. Money flowing between markets in general is healthy because of the lifestyle it allows. The convenience of credit cards is certainly worth some price, and responsible use of credit can facilitate a standard of life that living without credit does not allow. The same is true of government tax and the money that stays local. They each have their place and can be both good and bad for the economy.
What becomes a problem is when these four cash flows go out of balance. We now live in a world where entirely too much money goes to the top. The portion of commerce that goes to credit card expenses goes almost exclusively to corporate profits, and the corporate portion of our general commerce (McDonald's products, Wal-Mart's infrastructure, etc.) also syphon money away from us. This is something the Occupy movement has put a lot of effort into illuminating.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Daily Tip: Move to using Good Search
If you haven't, give Good Search a try. It's based on a model where you use it as your search engine, and the ad revenue is donated to the charity of your choice. There are all sorts of charities, but you can easily give to organizations that promote democracy without ever really having to do much more than lift a finger. One thing after another does really start to add up.
Daily Tip: Package Individual Portions of Leftovers
Growing up when there were leftovers it usually meant either 1 huge piece of tupperware in the fridge, or the pot everything was cooked in just thrown into the icebox. Take a little bit of extra time when you're packaging up your food to put it into individually portioned microwave safe containers. It makes it way easier to grab and run on your way to work, or to throw into the microwave when the tradeoff is leftovers or the fast food joint down the street. Anything to help avoiding spending money on other people processing your food is helpful.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)