DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“Since 1992 more and more research has shown that the USDA pyramid is grossly flawed.”

Here’s the “interactive” version of the USDA Food Pyramid.

Here is a deep analysis/dissection of it, from Scientific American: Rebuilding the Food Pyramid. The article includes the quote above.

And here’s SciAm’s new and improved pyramid. Most Americans won’t want to see it, because the bottom level calls for “daily exercise.” But what a relief that is, that the obvious and uncontested truth has been proposed as a recommendation by an authority. And get this — Scientific American is not selling cookbooks or processed-food bars.

Advice without an agenda! Whoa, I’d better sit down.

I’m sure the last thing on your mind when you move is telling the IRS your new address. I know this is true, because I moved last year, and I didn’t think of notifying the IRS until just now — when I opened yesterday’s mail and found that my annual “Social Security Statement” had been sent to my old address.

I’ll explain that connection: the SSA borrows the IRS’ address database.

Fortunately, the document found me at the new house, because I live in a small town and the mail carrier knows me. (We never filed the USPS change-of-address form because the USPS sells that database to direct marketers.) I say “fortunately” because the document contains a lot of very private information:

• my full name
• my birthdate
• my earnings history since 1983

The worst-case seems to be that the person who bought my house would discover how much money I’ve made (for every year for my life). But in fact the person who bought my house doesn’t live there… the house has been rented out. There’s no telling who could have gotten this data.

So, to preserve the privacy of your financial history, add this to your move-in checklist:

• File IRS form 8822, “Change of Address”

Last week, Frank (not his real name) took a job for minimum wage. A fortysomething Web engineer who has worked for some of the biggest dot-coms, Frank had come to expect that his nearly 100K-a-year income was assured. But now that he’s been out of work for a year, he simmers with suppressed energy… So he took the job with the teenage-level pay, even though he considers it a humiliation. An exploitation.

Well, life sucks all over, Frank. You bled the system as hard and fast as you could, changing jobs five times in as many years, demanding a $10,000 raise every time, ultimately tripling your salary over the boom years. You became an “impulse shopper” and traveled the world on your big dot-com paychecks. You bought a house in San Francisco?! And today you’re making $9/hr.

I don’t suppose you see the connection between overpriced employees and failing companies, do you?

I think a little loyalty might have helped out. It’s difficult to become indispensible when you’re still figuring out where the coffee machine is.

Before the crash, new hires were often paid more than senior employees — not because the new folks were more valuable to the company, but because the market forced adjustments to compensation packages. In other words, thanks to job-hopping mercenaries like Frank, companies had to pay more to get less-skilled employees, and the senior staff sometimes got cheated in this process.

Of course, lots of them still have jobs. “Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”

In our parents’ generation, a typical career path spanned exactly one employer. Young and multiply-pierced dot-commers laughed at the notion of the gold watch, not only because it’s a pretty pitiful token for 50 years’ hard work, but at the base concept that anyone should have to work for 50 years in the first place. Personally, I feel the same way — I don’t plan to work for 50 years. But the retirement horizon is a lot farther away than it was three years ago, and although I could blame faceless entities like “the economy,” I’d rather blame people like Frank. If he and his ilk had stuck with one company, and built some products with value, maybe the crash wouldn’t have happened.

OK, wait, I take that back — we were doomed from the start. Too many people were trying to cash out for the industry to sustain itself. And I’m sure no big-city newspaper reporter would get suckered by a venture capitalist’s sob story, so Frank has to bear the brunt of my wrath. Honestly, I’m impressed he stuck with the industry after the bottom dropped out. I’d think most long-term-unemployed folks would bail out of this sinking ship, into different (and higher-paying) jobs in other sectors.

San Francisco hosted an anti-war demonstration on Saturday. I was suspicious and disheartened that the San Francisco Chronicle reported the crowd size at “tens of thousands of people”. See also the headline: Huge protests for peace / Tens of thousands in S.F. demand Bush abandon war plans

Within the latter article, two more estimates are given:

The protest’s organizers, an umbrella coalition called International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War & End Racism, estimated the crowd at 200,000. Police put the number at 55,000.

Here is the report from A.N.S.W.E.R: 200,000 March in San Francisco. I understand that it is in the organizer’s best interests to overestimate attendance. But I don’t understand why it’s in the Chronicle’s best interests to underestimate it.

Today the SFPD realized their numbers were impossibly low: Protest numbers don’t add up / Police now say 150,000 safe guess. This makes the Chronicle’s earlier headline even more irresponsible and inaccurate. Kudos to the SFPD for admitting their mistake. Kudos to the Chron for publishing the SFPD’s recount. But I’d still like to see them publish a recant.

In other Peace Rally news, here’s the Chron’s Peace Rally Photo Gallery.

Here are aerial photos (with yet-another crowd-size estimate over 100,000).

Here is a gallery of rally photos taken by Bim Lipp, a participant who according to the Chronicle’s reporting could not possibly have been in San Francisco that day, because at least “tens of thousands” of participants coming from less far away had already arrived.

Mmmm, bialys!

(Those are raw, by the way.)

The recipe is from Artisan Baking Across America, and it’s the fastest bread I’ve made in months: about six hours, start to finish. The stuff in the center of each round is caramelized onion paste, apparently the traditional topping for these flatbreads.

They turned out very well for a first attempt, but I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be improved by an overnight fermentation, and maybe roasted garlic rather than onions on top. Fortunately, I have more flour in the cupboard…