Anyone up for a chat thread?

[RileyG]

The minimum wage here (for adults) is $24.10 per hour. (For juniors it's a bit less).

I think when I got my first job, and I was a junior then, I was earning about $15 an hour. That would have been in '96. So that gives you some idea of the difference.

That is quite different. I work full time and make $15.50 per hour, and roughly $20,000 per year, depending on my hours.

 

[Paidiske]

And - forgive me, I'm not trying to pry, but I have no frame of reference - is that considered a livable wage, where youi are?

 

[Shane R]

The minimum wage here (for adults) is $24.10 per hour. (For juniors it's a bit less).

I think when I got my first job, and I was a junior then, I was earning about $15 an hour. That would have been in '96. So that gives you some idea of the difference.

I've never earned that much hourly

 

[RileyG]

And - forgive me, I'm not trying to pry, but I have no frame of reference - is that considered a livable wage, where youi are?

Depends. Some say $20,000 isn't enough for full time work. It depends if someone can live on their means, or if they spend frivolously. For a single person? Maybe. For a large family? No.

 

[Shane R]

And - forgive me, I'm not trying to pry, but I have no frame of reference - is that considered a livable wage, where youi are?

Livable in my area is about $17/hr. It varies drastically by state in the US. On our West Coast you need to be in the vicinity of $30.

 

[RileyG]

Livable in my area is about $17/hr. It varies drastically by state in the US. On our West Coast you need to be in the vicinity of $30.

That doesn't surprise me.

 

[Paidiske]

I've never earned that much hourly

Like I said, you can't really directly compare our economies.

My vague sense is that we have fewer working poor (as a proportion of the population). Some things are more expensive, but then, other things cost much less (looking at healthcare!) But there is still real poverty. It's just different.

 

[Shane R]

That doesn't surprise me.

Even in the 3 C's of Ohio: Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland; you need to be over $20 to not be struggling.

 

[Shane R]

Like I said, you can't really directly compare our economies.

My vague sense is that we have fewer working poor (as a proportion of the population). Some things are more expensive, but then, other things cost much less (looking at healthcare!) But there is still real poverty. It's just different.

Your time lag on Hawaii should be about 6 or 7 hours I'm thinking. Just buy a couple of Monsters and you'll be able to power through. Are you familiar with SPAM? It's a canned meat product that is very popular out there. I fry it for my kids from time to time. My mother hates it.

 

[RileyG]

Your time lag on Hawaii should be about 6 or 7 hours I'm thinking. Just buy a couple of Monsters and you'll be able to power through. Are you familiar with SPAM? It's a canned meat product that is very popular out there. I fry it for my kids from time to time. My mother hates it.

When we were still living in our hometown, my Dad was the head of his department at the town's hospital. They hired a man from the Philippines. He LOVED Spam and so did his wife.

Never tried it, and I don't think I want to.

 

[Shane R]

If you fly to the West Coast first, that can reduce costs, and also avoids the misery of a flight time that rivals that of flights to Europe. From the West Coast, Hawaii takes slightly less time than a westbound transcontinental flight from JFK to LAX (LAX to JFK tends to be faster because of the tailwind from the jetstream, indeed the fastest ground speed I’ve ever had domestically was in 2008: 720 MPH on a Delta 757-200 flying to New York; we were an hour late leaving LAX due to a pilot being stuck in traffic, so they probably burned a bit of extra fuel to get us to JFK to make our connections, but I still had to rush from T2 over the speed ramp to the late lamented T3* for my connecting flight to Accra, Ghana.

*This was the former Pan Am Worldport, which unlike the TWA Flight Center (old T5) which was saved and became a boutique hotel with a Lockheed Starliner converted to a bar, T3 was razed - so too were T8 and T9, the old United and American terminals. T9 featured really beautiful stained glass in its check-in area. T6 was beautiful when first built, by National Airlines. What made JFK special was that aside from the old International Terminal, which was replaced by T4, each airline built their own terminal with their own architects, except for T2, which was jointly built by Delta, Braniff, Northwest and Northeast, which were too small at JFK to warrant their own terminals. T1 was built by Eastern and later taken over by US Airways, then demolished and rebuilt along the lines of T4.

LAX is somewhat similar in terms of having multiple airlines building their own terminals.

I'm so sick of the crap service at JFK. As much as possible, I try to route through LaGuardia. Which is not a whole lot better but a little. At least they've never given me enhanced security screening for having a 1,200 page book in my luggage (which is about what the Bible tends to be).

 

[Shane R]

When we were still living in our hometown, my Dad was the head of his department at the town's hospital. They hired a man from the Philippines. He LOVED Spam and so did his wife.

Never tried it, and I don't think I want to.

It's real meat. It's not nasty bits and pieces of processed who knows what. That's Treet, the considerably cheaper version produced by the Armour packing company. I chipped my front tooth on Treet many years ago and have never forgave that product.

 

[Paidiske]

Are you familiar with SPAM? It's a canned meat product that is very popular out there. I fry it for my kids from time to time. My mother hates it.

We have it here. I can't recall that I've ever eaten it.

When I was a kid, we did have tinned corned beef a bit. My dad would break it up and cook it with onion and tomato paste and spices and serve it up with pasta. That was reasonably edible, although I've never set out to recreate it, either...

 

[RileyG]

It's real meat. It's not nasty bits and pieces of processed who knows what. That's Treet, the considerably cheaper version produced by the Armour packing company. I chipped my front tooth on Treet many years ago and have never forgave that product.

Does SPAM taste anything like bologna? Bologna is probably one of my favorite deli meats followed by ham and deli chicken. I'm not a huge fan of deli Turkey, but tolerate it.

 

[Shane R]

We have it here. I can't recall that I've ever eaten it.

When I was a kid, we did have tinned corned beef a bit. My dad would break it up and cook it with onion and tomato paste and spices and serve it up with pasta. That was reasonably edible, although I've never set out to recreate it, either...

My father is quite proudly what we call a 'hillbilly' in the US. Canned meats were a regular component of their diets. As well as beans, bologna, and most any form of crackers, which are generally used to eat the meat as a sort of make-shift sandwich.

 

[Shane R]

Does SPAM taste anything like bologna? Bologna is probably one of my favorite deli meats followed by ham and deli chicken. I'm not a huge fan of deli Turkey, but tolerate it.

No. SPAM is a very salty version of ham.

 

[The Liturgist]

I'm so sick of the crap service at JFK. As much as possible, I try to route through LaGuardia. Which is not a whole lot better but a little. At least they've never given me enhanced security screening for having a 1,200 page book in my luggage (which is about what the Bible tends to be).

It didn’t use to be as bad as it is now. In the 2000s I enjoyed JFK, whereas LaGuardia was known as an anthill. But now, airline service in general is worse, because of mergers being permitted to happen that should have been blocked. The Big Six should not have been allowed to consolidate. In the case of US Airways merging with America West, US Airways probably would have gone out of business otherwise since their finances had become critical during their second chapter 11 bankruptcy, and is also likely that TWA would not have survived the post 9/11 downturn had it remained independent, but in the case of TWA, Carl Icahn literally killed it by leaving it with a large debt to him, and then after a second bankruptcy, agreeing to restructure that debt so that he could purchase TWA tickets for any flights connecting through their main hub in St. Louis at 45% off. This, combined with the crash of flight 800 and the cost of modernizing the aging fleet, doomed the airline. Which is a great tragedy, on the same scale as the loss of Pan Am. The failure of Eastern and Braniff were also tragic, but not on the same level. But even after the Big Six consolidated to the Big Three, other mergers have happened, like the Virgin America-Alaska Airlines merger, which have reduced consumer choice and competition. It seems quite possible Spirit could either collapse altogether or be forced into a merger due to their current chapter 11 bankruptcy. There was also the particularly egregious case where Frontier purchased Midwest, a much loved carrier renowned for their excellent service, and almost literally shut it down completely, by laying off most of the employees and closing the Milwaukee hub (which provided a useful alternative to O’Hare with its chronic runway congestion and delays for those in the northern suburbs of Chicagoland - it would have been even better had the interurban trains of the Chicago and North Shore like the famed Electroliner streamliners that served the Loop in Chicago and travelled from the Loop up what are now the Red Line and Purple Line and then on their own trackage to Milwaukee not been discontinued in the 1950s (there also used to be electric interurbans to Aurora and Elgin that terminated on the loop).

I don’t normally travel with a print copy of the Bible, since it is physically painful for me to read printed books, and I have the versions I like on my iPad, however, the Gideons, who I like, do distribute the KJV, which I also like, albeit unfortunately without the deuterocanonical books (but then again finding a complete KJV that has all of the books King James and the translators intended it to have is extremely difficult; I’ve never seen one in print although you might know where to get one, since the traditional Anglican liturgy reads from those books, albeit referred to in those churches that still adhere to the 39 Articles as apocrypha, and in those churches my understanding is they are read for moral edification but not as sources of doctrine. However in the Episcopal Church and in the Continuing Anglican churches, I would be interested to know if there exists more flexibility in the use of the deuterocanon. I would really like to have a printed KJV in my possession that had the “Apocrypha” present - the Orthodox Study Bible uses the NKJV testament together with an original translation of the Septugaint.

Since I really love the Septuagint and my church uses it preferentially, I like to take the 18th century Lancelot Brenton Septuagint, the Jordanville Psalter (which is the Coverdale Psalter modified to have the same versification and other corrections so it matches the Septuagint Psalter, which is also found in the Challoner Douai-Rheims), and the KJV as the New Testament.

Of course the Masoretic text has value to me also; I like many find Psalm 23 in the KJV to be incredibly beautiful, perhaps moreso than the Septuagint version or the Coverdale version, and also Psalms 1:12 in the MT-based BIbles like the KJV perserves a Christological reference absent from the Septuagint (usually the reverse is true, but there are cases where the MT has the more Christological reading, which in my opinion proves false the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the Jews edited the Masoretic Text to remove Christological lessons; also the Masoretic text is very similar to the Vulgate which was also translated directly from Hebrew and Aramaic texts. And it turns out from the Dead Sea Scrolls both versions, and also the Ethiopian BIble, have Hebrew attestation. I would love to see, for my own use at least, a Bible that represented a fusion of the MT and LXX according to those readings which most align with Christian doctrine..

 

[Shane R]

The Walmart Great Value brand of SPAM is even better than the real thing. And it's over a dollar cheaper. The fat content is probably around 30% which is a bit more than the name brand product. Nice and moist.

 

[RileyG]

No. SPAM is a very salty version of ham.

I have problems with my blood pressure, so I doubt my kidney specialist would appreciate if I ate very salty foods.

Specifically was told to follow a low sodium diet, even though I mess up quite often

 

[Paidiske]

My father is quite proudly what we call a 'hillbilly' in the US. Canned meats were a regular component of their diets. As well as beans, bologna, and most any form of crackers, which are generally used to eat the meat as a sort of make-shift sandwich.

My dad was a product of boarding school and then the military, before he married my mum. His culinary skills were a work in progress in my childhood. These days he's a very capable cook, but I was there when the promise of future greatness was but a glimmer on the horizon.

Would hillbillies mostly be farming folk? I'm sort of surprised their diet would be heavy in processed food, rather than what they might raise themselves.