Shrinkflation…

Posted on by June 6, 2025

It’s a thing…

One of America’s most popular restaurant chains has been accused of “shrinkflation” by some of its most loyal customers.

The Cheesecake Factory, famous for its large portion sizes, has 200-plus locations across the United States. The chain is well-known for having an expansive, calorie-packed menu of over 250 items across various cuisines.

But the restaurant is now being accused of shrinkflation, which is when companies make products smaller while keeping prices the same or raising them.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

Actually, this is nothing new, it’s been going on for a while, most notably with packaged foods like cereal, chips, cookies, etc. A couple of years ago, I got a bag of chips on a flight (YAY NO PRETZELS), and it had eight, count ’em EIGHT chips in the bag… sigh… The next bag had fourteen!

But this is now also hitting the restaurant chains, and anywhere food is served, I believe. I think you will see the end of ‘endless’ things like breads, salads, and buffets. The rationale is saving money for the corporation as profits shrink due to lack of customers and higher salaries to keep staff. Contrary to what the left says, restaurants run on thin margins, and any cost increase can cause a successful restaurant to go in the red.

That is why we’ve seen a number of ‘high end’ restaurants close on the west coast, between the new wage requirements, fewer customers, and higher cost of ingredients.

What is coming down the road? Personally, I think we will continue to see higher prices for less product, and portion sizes decreasing meat, fish, poultry, and pork in the stores. I also think we will see a diminishing of product availability in things like chips, cereal, soft drinks, and possibly things like condiments as manufacturers look at bottom lines and what product sells and what doesn’t.

Of note, from what I’ve seen over the years, American portion sizes were larger than anywhere else in the world… FWIW…

Your thoughts?

I got nothing…

Posted on by June 4, 2025

So you get humor…

Hugh Hefner became a multi millionaire by staying home in his pajamas. I am not having the same result.

Mom said “My child will not eat fish. What can I replace it with?” I replied “A cat, Cats love fish”

I came home and discovered my kids were on Ebay all day, if they are still on Ebay this evening I will lower the price”

What do you get when you cross a vampire with a snowman ? WHAT? Frostbite

People are too judgemental these days, I can tell by just looking at them.

Great hide and seek players are really hard to find.

My father worked 12 hours a day to put food on the table, a really great man but he sure was a very slow cook.

A cruise ship passes by a remote island, and all the passengers see a bearded man running around and waving his arms wildly. “Captain,” one passenger asks, “who is that man over there?”
“I have no idea,” the captain says, “but he goes nuts every year when we pass him.”

Surgery…

Posted on by June 4, 2025

By the time you read this, I will be on the way to the hospital for surgery to repair my fracture in my lower back after six months.

Prayers would be appreciated…

Go read the folks on the sidebar, they rite gud!

Way to go, kid!!!

Posted on by June 3, 2025

Qualifying for the US Open is known as ‘the longest day’ in golf because you have to play 36 holes of competitive golf in one day. It is truly a test of stamina and nerves…

Mason Howell may not be done with high school, but he’ll be headed to the 2025 U.S. Open.

The 17-year-old high school junior from Georgia punched his ticket to the 125th edition of the PGA Tour major after magnificent play in the qualifiers.

“That was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Howell said after the event.

Full article HERE from USA Today.

Kudos to him for taking the challenge and persevering!!! HERE is another link that shows all of the qualifiers and those (including the pros) that didn’t make it.

Even if he doesn’t make the cut, he will still have those memories at Oakmont to take with college with him in two years. And a helluva story for what he did this summer!

Hyperbole much???

Posted on by June 2, 2025

Bono is truly off his meds,  or high on ‘something’…

U2 frontman and longtime global activist Bono took a swing at the Trump administration disbanding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, blaming the cuts for a staggering 300,000 deaths.

And he was swiftly fact-checked by Rogan and Elon Musk in a takedown that lit up social media.

“This will f— you off,” Bono warned, claiming tens of thousands of tons of food are “rotting” in warehouses from Djibouti to Houston because of recent USAID cuts, and that the people who ran those warehouses have been fired. 

Full article, HERE from Yahoo News.

His ‘data’ came from the hypotheticals from this study HERE. Now if you go look at their methodology, they seem to base it on WHO, UN, and various articles/models. I tried to ‘follow’ what they were doing, but it didn’t click for me…

So Bono took a ‘study’ that is nothing more than a ‘model’ of what ‘may’ happen and translated that into 300,000 deaths laid at Trump/Doge feet…

He seems to have cherry picked ‘which’ data he wanted to use. From Fox, HERE, is a fairly clear statement of what is going on and why.

I don’t think anybody actually believes that ALL of the USAid programs were good, and there is no question that the mission has ‘drifted’ from the original concept. That is one reason to realign it and put it under State, who has better controls and, IMHO, a better boots on the ground feel for what is necessary.

Now there was some truth in what he said, in that thousands of tons of food is missing/rotting in various places. We’ve mentioned before how you can go to the souks in the 3rd world and find US Aid food for sale, still in the original packages. It is also proven the warlords in Africa are known to wait until food/aid is delivered, then stealing it for their own use, leaving the natives to starve.

When the hurricane hit Puerto Rico a few years ago, the US Aid provided pallets of water, desperately needed by the locals. Two years later, that same water STILL sat in warehouses where it had been unloaded because there was never a distribution system set up to actually deliver it!

And who knows how much money has gone to organizations/people/countries that never got to the people it was supposed to help? I doubt we will ever know…

 

 

 

A little humor…

Posted on by June 1, 2025

To start the week…

More bad puns…

Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.

· A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

· I know a guy who is addicted to brake fluid.  He says he can stop any time.

· How does Moses make his tea?  Hebrews it.

· I stayed up all night to see where the sun went.  Then it dawned on me.

· This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I’d never met herbivore.

· I’m reading a book about anti-gravity.  I can’t put it down.

· I did a theatrical performance about puns.  It was a play on words.

· They told me I had type A blood, but it was a type-O.

· PMS jokes aren’t funny, period.

· I didn’t like my beard at first.  Then it grew on me.

· A cross-eyed teacher lost her job because she couldn’t control her pupils.

· When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

· What does a clock do when it’s hungry?  It goes back four seconds.

· I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger.  Then it hit me!

· Broken pencils are pointless.

· What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary?  A thesaurus.

· England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

· I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

· I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.

· All the toilets in London police stations have been stolen.  Police say they have nothing to go on.

· I took the job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.

· Velcro – what a rip off!

· Cartoonist found dead in home.  Details are sketchy.

Here we go again…

Posted on by May 30, 2025

Back in the day, this was called ‘homesteading’, allowing people to extend tours, especially overseas or in areas with multiple bases in the same geographic area.

Military members should be moving less frequently for greater stability — and to save taxpayers’ dollars, according to defense officials who have set the process in motion for those reductions.

In a memo announced Wednesday, Pentagon officials ordered the military service branches to cut in half the amount of money they spend on permanent change-of-station, or PCS, moves by fiscal 2030. DOD spends about $5 billion a year on these moves, which include the physical moves of household goods as well as allowances and other entitlements related to moving.

Full article, HERE from Navy Times.

Of course, after a few years, the complaints started coming from folks who ‘wanted’ to go to these locations from ‘less’ popular locations…

Or folks that needed one of those locations to put a check in the box for a particular billet that somebody had been camping in for 6, 8, or 10 years, going from E-6 to E-8/9 because those billets got extra rating points.

There are benefits, especially for family members who work and can get promoted, or have school aged kids who want to stay with their friends or graduate from a particular location.

I will admit it will be better than what has happened in the past where ships/squadrons changed homeport or bases while deployed forcing dependents to shoulder the entire responsibility for moving, selling a house, buying a house, moving the kids, getting multiple vehicles across country, etc.

If this succeeds (for now), I expect to start hearing grumbling in 5-6 years about camping on good billets, yada, yada, yada…

I moved 8 times in 20+ years, not counting deployments. I knew folks that were moving every two years on the average, and others who just bounced base to base to base (Mayport, NAS Jax, NAS Cecil) and lived in the same house for their entire careers.

LONG overdue…

Posted on by May 29, 2025

DOJ has finally kicked the ABA to the curb!!!

The Justice Department on Thursday formally notified the American Bar Association that it will no longer comply with its ratings process for judicial nominees, the result of what it argues is a biased system and one that “invariably and demonstrably” favors nominees put forth by Democratic administrations.

The letter, sent by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to ABA President William R. Bay, was previewed exclusively to Fox News. It marks the latest escalation in a protracted legal fight that Republicans have waged against the nation’s largest association of legal workers.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

And here is the letter!

It has been known for a long time that the ABA, in collusion with the Dems, were only passing nominees that met the Dems criteria, and any conservatives suddenly had ‘stuff’ that should have been buried being brought to light.

Of course the ABA always denied doing that, but it was amazing how bar records, etc. seemed to just pop out of nowhere…

Yeah, right…

And of course the questionnaires were always just a ‘bit’ slanted… But you couldn’t complain.

Well, now they don’t get access, and the playing field is now much more level!

 

Snerk…

Posted on by May 28, 2025

Obviously a lot of the ‘kids’ today commenting on the latest SpaceX launch DO NOT remember or have not bothered to look at the history of the US space program…

The SpaceX team has shortened the build/test/shoot sequence an amazing amount, and continue to push the development envelope with every test. This time, they confirmed the ‘issues’ projected by modeling high angle booster return (didn’t work), and found more issues with leaks on the payload package.

In the old days, this would probably have been one test a year…