Big Potato - Don't Laugh!
Bird Flu Kills Man in LuZana
From Connie Schultz, who is great in seeing reality, grasping & analyzing it, and expressing it -
The artist is Traeger Di Pietro. He titled this, Like a Lion.
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This is real, even though “Big Potato” sounds funny. Curiously, a big shot in one of the 4 Big Potato corporations was a good friend and classmate of mine in law school.
The Rise Of Big Potato
By Katya Schwenk
One afternoon in April 2022, Josh Saltzman, the owner of a sports bar in Washington, D.C., opened his inbox to find what looked like a french fry price-fixing conspiracy.
Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective April 4, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like french fries and Tater Tots to bars and restaurants around the country, were all hiking their prices in lockstep, each by $0.12 per pound.
For Saltzman, it was hard to believe this was a coincidence. “It was just the most obvious example of collusion I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. “All of them were raising their prices by virtually the exact same amount within a week of each other.”
Frustrated, Saltzman took to the internet. “I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to fire off a tweet about Big Potato,’” he said. “Then it somehow took on a life of its own.”
Big Potato was more real than Saltzman had anticipated. That April, Saltzman’s offhand tweet — “Totally not collusion or anything, right?” — went viral. And last month, it was cited in a new spate of antitrust lawsuits brought against the four biggest companies in the frozen potato market, claiming the companies were in fact colluding when they all hiked their prices at the same time in 2022.
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This is outside my education & experience, so I don’t understand all of it, but seems worthwhile.
“Zombie” ponds repumping nature into Essex farmland
A conservation project is helping identify and restore wildlife-rich sites previously degraded and dried up
When Joe Gray coppiced a patch of woodland on his Essex farm, he noticed that an abandoned pond sprang back into life after it was exposed to sunlight.
“It was a hole in the woods with some leaves in it – we didn’t think of it as a pond,” he says. Since then, he and his wife, Emma, have restored 11 “zombie” ponds on their 450-hectare (1,100-acre) regenerative farm. They’ve also persuaded a group of neighbouring farmers to bring back to life 80 ponds within a 3-mile (5km) radius near Braintree.
Ponds that were dried up, shaded over or dominated by brambles have been opened up to sunlight and dug out, and are now burgeoning with rare aquatic plants, dragonflies and great-crested newts – also providing food and water for birds and bats.
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I won a lawsuit against Verizon! It really was not about the money, and I can prove that I was pure. Simply read below!
Verizon Administrative Settlement Administrator sent you money
Here are the details: Amount$14.81
Sent on Jan 06, 2025
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Louisiana bird flu patient has died
BATON ROUGE, La. — The Louisiana Department of Health reports the patient who had been hospitalized with the first human case of bird flu has died.
The patient, who was over the age of 65, was the first to be diagnosed with the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or H5N1, in Louisiana and the U.S. The patient was reported to have underlying medical conditions, DHH said Monday in a news release.
The patient contracted H5N1 after exposure to a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds.
LDH’s public health investigation has identified no additional H5N1 cases nor evidence of person-to-person transmi
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Take that, Donald Drumph!
Danish king changes coat of arms amid row with Trump over Greenland
Miranda Bryant Nordic correspondent Mon 6 Jan 2025 09.18 EST
The Danish king has shocked some historians by changing the royal coat of arms to more prominently feature Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.
Less than a year since succeeding his mother, Queen Margrethe, after she stood down on New Year’s Eve 2023, King Frederik has made a clear statement of intent to keep the autonomous Danish territory and former colony within the kingdom of Denmark.
For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden. [The Guardian]
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Singapore is famous for being very clean, and there seems to be some of that in government. Imagine how full our courts would be if there were criminal actions taken against US politicians who lied to Congress. [Mitch McConnell, we hear you.]
Worker’s Party boss and opposition leader Pritam Singh will hear his verdict in charges he lied to parliament. He’ll back in court Feb. 17 and I, for one, am looking forward to an update on his lawyer.
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