The city Health Department last week began sending brochures to businesses that would be affected by the latest ban, including restaurants, bars and any "food service" establishment subject to letter grades.

And merchants were shocked to see the broad sweep of the new rules.

"It's not fair. If you're gonna tell me what to do, it's no good," said Steve DiMaggio of Caruso's in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. "It's gonna cost a lot more."

And consumers, especially families, will soon see how the rules will affect their wallets -- forcing them to pay higher unit prices for smaller bottles.

Typically, a pizzeria charges $3 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke. But under the ban, customers would have to buy six 12-ounce cans at a total cost of $7.50 to get an equivalent amount of soda.

"I really feel bad for the customers," said Lupe Balbuena of World Pie in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Lots more junk going to be heading to landfills too. It'll be a boon for manufacturers of 16-oz plastic containers.

I love New York. Used to be that "if you could make it here, you can make it anywhere." But it should be, "If you can make it here, you've gotta be some kind of genius." Opening a restaurant is a nightmare that takes months, and to start a small nothing store--like one for office supplies, for example--is four times more expensive and time-consuming that just getting a warehouse in NJ and hauling everything over by truck, according to a buddy of mine who is shutting down his shop in Manhattan to do exactly that.

But NY will have what they want. An artist or a photographer or a fashion designer will rent his office instead, and they'll be bottled water drinkers. Beautiful people, living off of daddy's money.

I guess Diablo ALSO is against blue laws that xtians put up to stop people from drinking on Sundays, regardless of their personal beliefs, right?
Alexandrite

I am opposed to those. Are you?

And it's been ludicrous for a very long time now.

Do you support the ban, or not? And do you support blue laws, or not?

The USDA exists so that politically connected farmers can be paid not to grow crops, and so that farmers who plant crops for their families' own consumption can be fined, thereby creating more work for USDA bureaucrats.

The FDA exists so that hundreds of drug companies go bankrupt every year trying to jump through the double-blind test hoops and the horribly outdated placebo-effect testing that causes the cost of the drugs that are approved to come with a $400 million price tag already built in, and which have to subsidize the four drugs out of five that make it through Phase III, but that the FDA rejects anyway.

A private citizen has more rights and choices in authoritarian regimes than in the United States of America. But that's good, for me and my business. Every single one of these headlines and issues are good for me personally. Keep 'em coming.

Or does the United States Department of Agriculture = The Gestapo in Diablo's world?

#20 | Posted by Alexandrite

My mom's family had a large farm in Anderson, Indiana. The Roosevelt Administration ordered them to cut production three years below what they needed to even feed the family. They--and most other farmers--grew the crops anyway, but some farmers had their farms confiscated to be made examples of.

This was all for a good cause, of course, to put a floor under crop prices. Good for the collective, you might say.

But to the liberals' favorite all time president, except maybe the retard we have now, he was like a god. He could do no wrong, ever. Try to pack the Supreme Court? Locks up hundreds of thousands of American citizens who have funny eyes? Stealing generations-old family farms for growing corn? No problem. Chisel his face on Rushmore, say the uberlibbies.

I know all about the USDA. They're thieves, and work for an agency that was borne of evil. Little wonder the USDA needs SWAT teams, given how many in flyover country would like to handle the problems posed by those fascists.

Why should you? Family farms all over the Midwest were appropriated by the USDA. Are you ignorant of that fact? Japanese were interred after Pearl Harbor. Were you unaware of this? But why should a libbie care? It was all for a good cause, right? Why is it such a stretch for [...] to read that FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court with his own lackeys, failed, then when he did get the legislation he wanted, he enforced it in the same way totalitarians elsewhere did?

You believe that Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, unerring in all things. And I think liberals are stupid in the first place. Thus, our failure to communicate.

Beginning in 1938, the Agriculture Department dictated how many acres of wheat each of America's 1.5 million wheat farmers could produce. Government administrators were so concerned about maintaining a stranglehold on the wheat supply that they would seize the title to a farmer's entire wheat harvest if he planted a single acre of wheat more than federal farm bureaucrats permitted.

My mom's family has had a 400-acre farm on Florida Road in Anderson, IN since the middle of the 19th century. Tell you what: let's go off-site, and wager $10,000 that I can prove all of what I've just said.

During the war, the policy changed, because suddenly farmers had to ramp up production to feed Allied armies all over the world. The War Board ordered the family to house 20 farm laborers to help in the fields, although they weren't needed. (I think it was 20--my great-aunt said it was more, but I think it was a fixed number, and the people would come and go. The diaries and pay records have a lot more than 20 names but I think it was because of the composition that it became confusing).

Further, it was a big problem because five of my great uncles were off fighting, and their wives and kids moved back to the farm during that time. So the migrants had to live in tents in the back of the property for the first several months until housing could be built. At first there were always problems with the police being called out because of fighting, booze. We had tractors and didn't need the labor, but other farms had big problems because they had cut production back so far during the mid-30's that they frankly didn't even know how to farm anymore.

Ah, the great success of big government. I think Roosevelt was a fool, more than anything. Wholly ignorant of the law of unintended consequences. Amazing how easily he fooled so many people, and still does.

If you want to live in Somalia where there's a total free market, just move there.

#28 | Posted by Alexandrite

Libbies always reach for the Somalia jar when they open the fridge. Who would want to live in a hellhole run by cannibals?

How about Singapore? Switzerland? South Korea? Just to name off the top of my head three other "S" countries that aren't named Somalia where we're more free to do as we please than just about anywhere in the good ol' USA.

[...]. If you get a piece of meat with some glass in it, you can take it back to the butcher, raise hell, and get your money back and a good bit more. That's the way it used to be in the US too. But not anymore. Now, we expect someone in Washington to take care of it. So they pass laws all over the country, hire 200,000 people with powers to fine and arrest, create price spikes, and put thousands of small companies out of business. All because you found something in your beef that didn't taste quite right.

So when you bitch and moan about the virtues of big government, don't forget what you're really doing: giving Monsanto and ADM a giant pile of money, and shutting down dozens of companies who just give up in the face of all the new laws you want. Every time a liberal has a good idea about how to make life better, the Forbes 400 make a lot more money.

You ever wonder why American cheese sucks so bad? They're all the same. Medium cheddar tastes the exact same, brand to brand to brand, everywhere in the US.

In Europe, it isn't like that. You can taste the rich differences in the cheese even town-to-town. But not here. Sameness and uniformity, everywhere. Just one example. Can't even sell your own milk without the USDA SWAT team raiding your farm. Doesn't matter that the customers want it, that they know it's not pasteurized. Somebody has to keep all these jack boots on the payroll, and if family farms can raise whatever they want, a whole lot of six-figure bureaucrats don't have much to do anymore.

To liberals, government always knows best. Your life is boring and dull and tasteless, and you don't even know it.

Nah. I'll just vote with my feet. More money for me.

Obama Uber Alles!

--Also Sprach Zarathustra

All authoritarians are just about the same.

Not my problem though. Enjoy your higher insurance premiums (ObamaCare), higher gas and food prices (ZIRP), and higher taxes and deficits. Remember--it's not the results that matter. It's how good you feel about yourself for voting in the hope and change. Keep hope alive!

They're there to take care of helpless people, so they don't have to themselves. Lots of that going around.

It's a little disconcerting to see how useless American men have become. In the Great Depression days, there would be guys knocking on my granddad's door nightly, begging for work. He did what he could. Now, we have crops rotting in the fields, a ten-minute drive from huge populations of food stamp recipients and unemployed. It doesn't even occur to them--or anybody--to head out and pick apples in Michigan, or wheat in Iowa, or oranges in Florida. And why should they? Easier to watch TV and head out to the mailbox first of the month.

This situation won't last long. The money is running out. But it's more than money. It's a waste of human capital. There is absolutely no reason that I shouldn't be able to grow food on my own land to consume myself, or to sell to passers-by. But in giant tracts of the USA, we're not allowed to. That wasn't brought to you by small-government conservative types, but by people like you.

Hope you own a lot of MON and ADM stock. May as well get rich too.

Agree completely.

They were willing to work then. Now, we pay them to stay away from jobs. It's a weird arrangement. Liberals complain about the lack of jobs in high-crime areas; conservatives complain about paying inner-city minorities welfare monies. But in the end, both sides want the same thing: to keep poor people out of their neighborhoods. That explains the welfare state, right there. And why we're on our third and fourth generations of people who don't work, and don't have any idea how.

It should be insulting to a welfare recipient, that we think so little of him that we don't even want him to be able to feed himself, or that he is incapable of it. But that comes with the deal, too. Eventually you have to kind of agree that you can't contribute anything productive to the society you're living in. Before long, it becomes true.

I don't distrust them. They're just a waste of time. Like the TSA patdowns.