Author: photog

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 18JUL2025 – Reason 2,412; Make Coke Great Again

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Reason 2,412: Coke is bringing cane sugar back to Coca Cola!

Not to hijack your thread, but this is HUGE!
https://nypost.com/2025/07/16/us-news/trump-says-coca-cola-agrees-to-use-real-cane-sugar-in-us-drinks-its-just-better/
Monsanto hardest hit.

The taste difference between high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar is significant.
Here in Texas, I can buy “Mexican Coke”. It comes in a glass bottle and has cane sugar.
I buy it as a treat, not as my regular beverage because it is expensive (Glass costs a lot to ship) and inconvenient. (Glass breaks.)
But a cane sugar Coke in a can! Man, I’m lovin’ it!

Reason 2,411 for Why Donald Trump Has Made America Greater – Stephen Colbert Cancelled

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Stephen Colbert hates Donald Trump.  He has said incredibly vile things about him both in and out of office.  So, it must be especially satisfying for Trump to know that his term in office will outlast Colbert’s television show.  And that is a feeling I also share.  I think Colbert is an unfunny comedian and a joyless culture warrior of the Left who preaches a woke agenda endlessly and boringly.

Years ago, he was Jon Stewart’s straight man on the Daily Show when both of them tried to make Barack Obama seem cool.  Now he’s Dave Letterman’s failed replacement on the Late Show and he’s managed to kill off his side of late-night comedy.

Now granted, his $15 million salary is a big part of why the Late Show is being ended.  Broadcast and cable television no longer make much money.  An aging viewing audience and the pharmaceutical companies that advertise to them are reaching the ends of their roads.  By replacing Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon with cheaper talent (or forcing them to take a huge reduction in salary) the networks can probably get another three or four years out of this set-up but essentially late-night comedy is no longer a thing.

But that shouldn’t stop me from enjoying guys like Colbert and Stewart (yeah, him too) getting the old heave-ho.  By splitting their audience into Left and Right their viewership tanked and their employers lost a lot of money.

Now Fox has positioned Greg Gutfeld as the competition for Colbert and the rest of the unfunny late-night hosts.  And he’s killing them in the ratings because ABC, CBS and NBC have to split the same 50% of the audience while Fox gets 100% of the other half.  But more importantly I think he’s only making a fraction of what they make in salary and he appears on two or three different shows on the network.

Now the real innovation may happen when someone decides to be funny to 100% of the audience.  In other words, try actual comedy and make fun of everyone equally.  It used to work quite well in the old days before women, minorities and sexual deviants were declared sacred cows and placed off limits from mockery leaving only straight white men as the only punchlines for unfunny comics.

Well, anyway, we won’t have Stephen Colbert to kick around anymore.  But there is a rumor that MSNBC or whatever they’re going to call that place may hire Colbert to do what Rachel Maddow currently does but for less money.  This seems far-fetched but who knows.  When price tag becomes the most important consideration new possibilities open up.  How about Keith Olbermann?  He used to be Rachel Maddow in the old days and he doesn’t make any money at all presently.  If they gave him anti-depressants and shaving supplies, I think he’d jump aboard again.  And maybe after Whoopi Goldberg gets canned from “The View” she might be available for MSNBC.  Of course, if feeding her was part of the deal that could be costly.

Well, anyway, today was a wonderful day.  And if the recission bill gets approved in the House on Friday that will be a wonderful day too.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 17JUL2025 – The People’s Food

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Chemist said

“Finally, as with anything related to NYC, there will also be a ton of graft and outright theft.”

Indeed in a little city near where I live there was an excellent grocery store part of one of the larger New England Chains. It was brand new, had good prices, all sorts of products, including very high quality produce and types of produce (Jicama, Star Fruit, Mangoes, Plantain etc) rarely if ever seen in New England Grocery stores. After about 3-4 years of operation, the chain closed it. I happened to know a person who was a relative of one of the managers. Shrinkage (i.e. Theft) was the main issue. But it wasn’t shoplifting or at the front of the store as they say. It was the back of the store, cases of stuff (canned, produce, meat) would come in the back and go right back out often to be broken up and sold to small stores and restaurants. Now, picture NYC and that Mamdani will try to use these grocery stores as a way to employ the indigent and his pals (but I repeat myself) and picture the scenario I just spelled out. Ultimately the stores would just be another sink hole for NYC taxes; they’d be losing money hand over fist from the day they opened.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 17JUL2025 – Grocery Wars

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So Mandani wants to have city run grocery stores.
Let’s say he gets his wish.
Grocery stores run about a 3% profit margin. This is for the big boys: Kroger, Safeway, HEB, etc.
The smaller chains have less buying power and can’t get the gross margins the big guys can so they run 1 to 2% profits. I don’t think NYC is going to get the same gross margin as Kroger.
Chain grocery stores employ a lot of younger, minimum wage people.
NYC stores will have to employ NYC city civil servants with all the benefits attached to being a city employee: Higher wages, gold plated health care, pensions, etc.
Pretty sure the 1% profit margin just left the building right there.
Then there is spoilage – because those folks living in the “Food deserts” aren’t going to be buying fresh stuff no matter how much the mayor says it is good for them.
Finally, as with anything related to NYC, there will also be a ton of graft and outright theft.
I predict the stores will run 20-30% in the red
This will be a HUGE debacle. But it might be fun to watch.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 17JUL2025 – The Workers’ Paradise

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Burlington, Vermont, experienced a mini-version of this when the increasingly socialist city government raised property taxes on businesses to the point that all the grocery stores moved out. In response to the “food-desert” crisis, the city tried to lure food stores back, but the restrictions and requirements for what products had to be stocked, how much had to be “organic”, etc, resulted in only one taker, a “Whole-Foods” type grocery, with prices way too expensive for the low-income neighborhoods it was supposed to service.
Reductions in the Police Dept have resulted in some areas of the city becoming no-go zones, and the once-prosperous Church Street shopping district has lost its major anchor stores, and is overrun with panhandlers and homeless.
(Thanks, Bernie!)

Mamdani; Wake-Up Call or Extinction Event

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I was reading an article, Rise of Zohran Mamdani has Wall Street giving up on Gotham about how the CEOs of some of the largest financial corporations in New York (and by extension in the world) were invited to meet with Zohran Mamdani by the influential NYC Partnership.

“The list of New York City-based CEOs that declined the Partnership’s invitation includes Jamie Dimon, the nation’s top banker and chief of JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank; Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of private equity powerhouse Blackstone; Brian Moynihan, the head of Bank of America, the nation’s second largest bank; Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager; and David Solomon, the CEO of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.

Most publicly pleaded “scheduling conflicts.”

But “what is this guy going to tell us that we don’t already know?” is how someone close to Solomon described the situation.”

At the end of the article the writer sums up why the big banks don’t need to make nice with the upcoming communist mayor of New York.

“And that gets us to why there were so many no shows Tuesday: the city’s business community doesn’t have to stay.

If you follow these big firms, as I do, you know they employ hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers — but fewer and fewer in recent years.

The harsh COVID lockdowns here gave them the excuse to move operations to places with lower taxes and regulations, mainly Florida and Texas, but also Utah and even Tennessee.

Mamdani will be another reason for the big banks to finally say goodbye to Gotham.”

And that brings me back to my title question; how much damage will Mamdani do?  Will four years of communism spark a repeat of how the David Dinkins administration ushered in the Giuliani renaissance or will it result in something similar to what happened to Detroit?

Now history doesn’t repeat itself but if I were asked to guess which of these two historical examples will be closer to the result of a Mamdani administration I’d say without much hesitation Detroit.  Now don’t get me wrong, New York City is remarkably different from Detroit but the ingredients for a staggering decline in the economic vitality of New York City are all on view to see.

Mamdani wants to re-ignite the welfare state as it’s never been imagined before.  He even wants the city to open grocery stores to battle the high cost of eggs.  The cost of such a program is frightening to even consider.  Add in the waste and incompetence of all city run enterprises and catastrophic failure is almost an immediate certainty for this awful idea.

Then there’s Mamdani’s plan to neuter the NYPD and make them some kind of hall monitors for the city’s gang members.  Basically, he will replay the 2020 George Floyd riots on an endless loop for his four years in office.

And finally, he’s on record as saying billionaires shouldn’t exist so imagine how he plans to usher in his redistribution of wealth in the Big Apple.

Probably the first nail in the coffin for the city will be the job losses when the big banks and other financial institutions head down to Texas, I’m guessing the losses will be staggering.  It will turn downtown Manhattan into a ghost town.  After that the tanking of commercial and residential real estate in Manhattan will evaporate trillions of dollars of value.  And the shockwaves from these disasters will echo through the outer boroughs and the suburbs where the financial sector workers lived.  It will be very ugly for the whole region.

And yet, it’s the best result in the long run.  Crashing the largest city in the country will be an object lesson for every woke moron who ever decided that democracy means voting for endless free stuff and eliminating the police is the solution to crime.

Okay New York.  Vote in Mamdani.  Prove just how suicidally stupid you really are.