Beyond Halloween

Okay, so I've just tried a Beyond Burger for the first time. I've never been more apprehensive about eating something.

It's a strange one for me, as I've been a vegetarian for twenty-five years - since I was a teenager - and I've never been one for meat substitutes. I've said this before on here, but I've just never had the appetite for meat. Even when I ate it I generally wasn't too keen on it. I couldn't quite escape the sense that I was eating an animal - unless the meat was very heavily disguised. Consequently, when I did make the decision to officially forgo it it was a smooth transition.

So the problem I had trying the beyond burger, ironically, was that it felt a little too much like meat. It's like spooky Halloween props. You know the severed head is just a model. You know the blood is just fake blood. Yet still, it can spook you out on some instinctive level. Especially if it looks realistic. So it kind of felt like I was cooking real meat as it sizzled in the pan.

On top of this there was also the mental apprehension about the ingredients. What is this I'm eating? Is it healthy? Is it natural?

So there was a multi-layered apprehension.

When I finally did sit down to eat it it was just like eating a regular beefburger as far as I could remember. (I bought the classic sesame seed burger buns in the end, I didn't go with wholemeal as I said I would.) It felt like when I was a kid and I had a burger from McDonald's or something.

It's that long since I ate meat that I can't really say how close to meat the taste actually was, but the vibe was the same. Again, I felt like I was eating meat, though my brain knew otherwise. So it was a little weird.

The only other meat substitute product I sometimes eat are Linda McCartney sausage rolls, lol. It's slightly different with them though. Firstly, because the pastry disguises the 'meat'. Then secondly I've been eating them intermittently for so long that I don't think of them as meat anyway. I just think of them as soya, which is what they are. So maybe it would be similar with the beyond burger after a few rounds of eating it.

Anyway, at least I can now say I've tried the product I've invested in. 

What School Should Look Like.

Let's say you're a parent. School has been abolished. You work thirty hours a week and need childcare to cover twenty of those hours. (Let's say a partner or family member looks after the child for the other ten.)

You get government vouchers to cover the cost of that twenty hours of childcare.

The beauty of this, as opposed to sending your child to school, is that it's flexible and works around you. With school your child had to be there from nine o'clock until three o'clock every day. You had to work around these hours. Making sure your child got picked up or dropped off at these times. No matter the inconvenience to you or the child. Now the childcare works around you. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, weekends. It covers the time you need covering. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Actual Education of Your Child

Now school is abolished your child has an online curriculum, chosen by you. (Though you can just follow the standard government-recommended curriculum if you'd prefer.) And they can do their work anytime they or you want them to. They simply open their laptop and get started. If they need help they can watch lessons online. Or they can ask the AI assistant. Or they can ask for help from online human teaching assistants.

When you send your child to childcare you can ask that your child spends some time doing this work. Perhaps they attend for five hours and you want them to spend two hours on education. The rest they can spend playing. The childcare worker doesn't have to be a teacher or an expert in Maths and English. All they have to do is help your child access the lessons and expert help that are available to them online.

Schools Become Education Hubs

On top of this, the place that was once your local school is now an education hub. More like a college than a school. Instead of attending rigidly from nine o'clock each day until three, as children once did, now your child simply attends for a few hours a week for specific lessons - in a timeslot that is convenient to you. Just as someone would go for a driving lesson at a specific time for that specific reason.

The government offers you ten hours of this local, in person, education to use each week. And you can use as little or as much of it as you like.

This real world education is focused on the most crucial aspects of education - Maths and English. It also offers things that develop social skills and public speaking. Such as sports, debate and drama.

So, for example, your child could have a ninety minute maths lesson on a Monday morning. Two hours of English on a Tuesday afternoon. Then drama class on Thursday evening.

As these education hubs would no longer be providing round the clock care for every child, as they did when they were schools, the quality of education offered would be dramatically improved. Instead of thirty children to a classroom, for six or seven whole hours each day, there would be one or two hours lessons that have just four or five children in the room.

There would be less time in school, but that time would be much more focused and worthwhile.

Likewise, poor or struggling families could be allocated more of this in person help with education if that was needed.

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[To give a simpler example as an addendum, you could halve class sizes just by halving the length of the school day. Instead of thirty children in a classroom for six hours you could have fifteen in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. This would be better for the actual education of the child. They'd be happier, school would be more peaceful and inducive to learning, and they'd get more care and individual focus.

However, if this happened people would cry, "But who will look after the child on the morning/afternoon when I'm at work!"

Showing again that school in its current form is little more than glorified childcare. Though people are loath to admit this. That's why school needs scrapping altogether and replacing with actual (and genuinely flexible) childcare. It's only then that an education that works for the actual sake of the child's development and learning can be put into place.]

Beyond Meme

Another interesting day in the Beyond Meat saga.

It opened high, continuing the rocket to the moon of previous days, but by the day's end it had finished slightly in the red. It's now getting hammered down more in the after hours trading. Though it's still a lot higher than it was last week.

I feel a little mercenary, as I took more profit during those early highs. It seemed wise to take the money I'd put in off the table. So whatever happens I can't really lose now. Before this week I'd invested about $650 in total. I've now sold around $700 of stock. Leaving me with about $400 worth in my account.

I've been very lucky. Especially considering I was down around $400 last week. So I've kind of came out with $400 of free stock in the end.

What happens with that stock now I don't know. My opinions have moved back and forth a little depending on what articles and videos I've been consuming. Overall I still feel it's a neat way to turn the company around. A brand that was once viewed as a darling of the globalist overlords is now rebranded as a people's stock. With those invested (and investing) in the meme perhaps also developing an emotional investment in the actual products.

And, with the company getting three more years of life thanks to the debt restructuring, there's time for that potential turnaround to bed in. So there is some outlook for optimism.

However, ..it's also a neat way to rinse retail investors as a company faces its death rattle. So pessimism might be the best armour.

As I noted yesterday, it could well be both. We see this dichotomy with Bitcoin. The endless pump and dumps and "We're Going To The Moon." The believers buying and holding for the long term. The more unscrupulous buying, but also selling to skim profits, as they fluff the hype to the true believers on the rollercoaster. Yet, as the ups and downs are skimmed, the wider Bitcoin upward trend continues.

So maybe this is similar. Beyond Meat continues into the future (and the company won't be going bankrupt - at least not any time soon), but at the same time that doesn't mean believers won't be taken for a ride along the way. (We even see the same 🚀rocket emoji and language in all the posts hyping it. So it looks like the same playbook.)

As for me, I won't be selling what I have left. I know I said that yesterday, but this time I mean it. Largely because I'm in work the next two days, so won't be sat anywhere near a screen when the markets open. I do genuinely want to hold some for the long term though, and as what I have now is essentially free it'll be a lot easier to do. So that should be the plan.

I'm also definitely going to buy some beyond burgers next week to finally try them. Hopefully that'll be my next post and I won't be having to post daily about this until then.

To Infinity and Beyond ..Meat

The cow jumped over the moon.

Well, so much for the red-faced Beyond Meat losses. Something's happened. I'm not entirely sure what. There's a short squeeze. It's a meme stock now. There's been an announcement about increased distribution with Walmart. It all seems quite convenient, but I'll pretend I haven't noticed that.

Yesterday (Monday) the stock was up over 100%. Now, today, it's up a whopping 146%.

Earlier I took some profits - I don't like to look a gift horse in the mouth. However, I'm going to continue to hold most of my stock. Overall, (including the profits taken), I'm up over $300. That's after being down over $400 just five days ago.

It's very interesting to watch ..and fun. I've accidentally ended up being involved in a meme stock moment.

I'm not quite sure where things go from here. My instinctive feeling is that this all represents (a somewhat orchestrated) turn around for the company. However, it could of course be some kind of pump and dump, where retail investors (regular folk) are encouraged to buy in for fear of missing out. Naturally, even if it is a turn around, there'll be a bit of both to some extent.

I've been watching videos about the short-selling. I'm not really one for pointing at candles on graphs, so the technical analysis is interesting, but secondary to me. I understand short-selling in theory, in the abstract, but the actual ins and outs of how it works - the who does what and when - isn't something I'm directly familiar with. So I hear this stuff, see the general numbers, but have little confidence I know what it all means in a practical sense. I get that if you've borrowed something, sold it, and now have to buy it back, you might be a bit f*cked if the price starts rising ..but how these big players actually do all that in reality, like, I don't know.

And I'd be a fool to think I do. So I'll just watch and learn. Getting a little semi-education via osmosis.

So, I've had a bit of luck, took a little profit, and now I can enjoy the ride a bit more comfortably. Though maybe it'll be the animals that get the real luck in the long term. Still, it's difficult to say. Clearly a lot can change in a few days.

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Oh, and it's perhaps worth adding, that the gold and silver miners (the ones that have helped fund my Beyond Meat excursion) were hugely down today. As were gold and silver in general. So it really is swings and roundabouts.

Beyond Meat - Paying for the Ride

Earlier this year I made a post asking, Will There Ever Be A Vegan Nestlé?

In that post I mentioned that I'd bought some stock in the company Beyond Meat, and I wondered aloud if we'd ever see a huge food multi-national like Nestlé that was exclusively animal friendly. Or if profitable smaller vegan companies would simply get bought up by these existing giants.

Incidentally, Nestlé's stock rose today after an announcement that they're going to be laying off 16,000 workers. So that's bad news, though I guess good news for me, as I own a little bit of Nestlé as well. The Beyond Meat shares however - they're not doing too well. To say the least. And worse still, I've been topping up my position. Buying more on the big slide down. I'm about $400 down, *grimace*.

It's not too bad though, as I'm still doing fairly well overall.

The gold and silver miners are paying for my vegan experiment. In fact, the Beyond stock is the only massively risky thing I own really.

(I kinda feel that bar might

be even higher tomorrow)

So the question is now, have I completely wasted my money? Will Beyond Meat just go out of business.

It's not looking pretty.

The short answer is, I don't know. Whatever happens I'm going to ride it to the bottom though. It was a punt to begin with, so I'm not about to bail out here when it's getting interesting. Whenever I'm in a situation like this the psychology is always very interesting too. There's a social embarrassment that comes with losing money - you look foolish. Like a loser ..literally. So there's this tendency to want to get out of the door as quickly as possible to avoid further humiliation.

For instance here I felt the need to share the graph showing I'm doing well overall to offset the negative. As if to say, "Look, I'm not an idiot, this is just a daft a little side punt that I basically did for a laugh." Though, of course, that's not true. I bought it as a punt, yes, but with the hope that perhaps there would be long term upside. Certainly not for a laugh.

If this psychology applies to me - someone that's generally happy to be an anti-social contrarian - then you can imagine how it works in the wider world. People stampeding out of a stock because the red lights are flashing. Consequently I'm always sat wondering if these investors are being sensible or just blindly panicking. Perhaps the panic itself is sensible? At least they'll save some money if they run when everyone else starts running.

Normally when I go against the grain I don't care at all. I'm comfortable riding out red numbers. The only other time I felt like an idiot was with the Russian stocks - my only other big mistake thus far. I did feel a touch of embarrassment there.

The Sberbank, Gazprom and Evraz shares are still sitting, comatose, in my eToro account, so I'm enjoying the experiment nevertheless. Perhaps they'll reanimate at some point. And maybe these Beyond Meat shares will come back from the dead. Though my slightly reddened face suggests I'm sugar-coating an obvious mistake.

Being vegetarian I also have a moral dog in the fight. Albeit I've never actually tried a beyond burger. (Again, foolhardy to invest in a product I've never even tried - normally I tend to buy things I like and use.) Really I should try one. It would be fun. Plus, with government mandating folic acid in everything I'm looking to widen my dietary options anyway.

I must remember to buy some beyond burgers - and some wholemeal flour buns - and then report back.

The wider cultural trend seems to be a move towards vegetarianism/veganism and animal welfare. However, the recent rightwards shift we're seeing in politics runs counter to this, and it's becoming fashionable to positively espouse meat-eating in these circles. The animal-friendly options being heavily associated with globalism and all its ills. I've even seen these products referred to as goyslop. The claim that these products aren't natural and healthy heightening this. So it's difficult to gauge which way the wind is blowing.

I would like to see us move away from animal products, but in a way that's positive for humans too. Perhaps the back and forth will force an evolution towards excellence. Either way, it's interesting to watch.

So, as with the Russian shares, I'm enjoying the journey, but the fare price has a been a little hefty so far.

Astrology, Rhesus Negative ..and Folic Acid in Bread

A month or so ago I found out I was rhesus negative - A negative in particular.  To be honest, I'm only mentioning it here for cynical reasons. I made a blog post about it over on my red hair blog (a place more apt for it, given some of the online woo associating RH- with redheads). Anyway, that particular post got a spike in views, so I'm mentioning it here to see what happens. It's a strange topic, as it's something that comes up online in woo-woo land, in relation to aliens and other wackiness, but it largely goes unmentioned elsewhere. It's similar to blood groups in general. They're a big deal in Japan, they make a big fuss about them. It's like a person's star sign (we'll come to horoscopes next). Here in the west it isn't considered worth mentioning though, unless for practical reasons like blood donations and so forth. The fact that I only recently found out my blood type confirming this general lack of care - and I only discovered mine because I purposely ordered a test from Amazon out of curiosity.

Astrology

More woo now. I've been taking a slight interest in astrology. Largely accidentally, as a channel I watch on YouTube dabbles in it. I'm sure it's all nonsense - it must be, right? But still it's a bit of fun and the history of it is interesting. Also, it strokes the ego a little bit. Like the rhesus negative blood, it gives a sense of, "I'm special."

"This is my chart, this is why I'm so interesting."

I mentioned that I was a Taurus on this blog not too long ago, that time in relation to childhood memories, and how it never really appealed to me. I never really saw myself as an angry, hulking bull. An unthinking hothead. However, the YouTuber pointed out that the bull isn't angry all the time. Most of the time it's solitary and placid. It's just that when it does get angry it gets really angry. Which is true of me, I must admit. A good example being this recent thing where the UK government is mandating that all plain flour must be fortified with folic acid.

I'm genuinely pissed off about it (though most of the time I tend to be shy and passive). I'm still in a mood now as a I type, even though my initial burst of annoyance was yesterday. (I wanted to overthrow the government yesterday 😅). It also annoys me that other people aren't as annoyed as I am. 

It's a bit of a detour from the astrology, but this impulse to mass medicate populations. In ways where it effectively becomes impossible or illegal to avoid it is just outrageous to me. We see the same thing with the fluoridation of water. Even if there were no health downsides whatsoever the principle alone would be worth fighting for. How dare you medicate me against me wishes.

And, as with Covid, I'm past the point of caring about public health. If the rest of the country are happy being treated like barnyard animals that's their problem. Not me.

We also recently had news that the UK government are banning restaurants from refilling sugary drinks - i.e. from giving free top-ups. Again in the name of public health. This one doesn't affect me in the slightest, but I'm peeved nonetheless. This endless interfering; this endless communism. So much money, time and effort wasted to busybody.

You really have to wonder at the mentality of the people making such rules. Some bad things that governments do make sense. For instance, censorship. I get why governments censor people. They want to exercise power, and people contradicting the narrative are a threat and hindrance to them. I don't agree with the censorship, but there's a logic to it. Bringing in a rule to ban the refilling of a cup of hot chocolate is just completely inane though. That they think the idea in the first place is telling. That they then go to such an effort to implement and enforce the idea condemns them entirely.

Give these people a China-style social credit system and they will be worse than China.

Back To Astrology

Anyway, let's back to lighter things. I got myself a birth chart thingy. (Just type 'create birth chart' or something to that effect into Google and countless free generators pop-up.)

My Moon is in conjunction with Venus, and they're both in opposition to Saturn, whatever that means. I did read some of the descriptions from the site that produced the chart and they were actually quite accurate to be fair. Especially in regard my woeful dealings with the opposite sex. Of course, there's always the tendency to pick and choose, and to see what we want to see though. The vagueness leaves a lot of room for interpretation. So it's easy to read too much into things.

Still, it's more fun than spending time trying to avoid the countless industrial chemicals the government tries to shove down our throats.

The Gary Neville Thing

For future context this is in response to Gary Neville blaming the "division in the country" on "white middle-aged men" who are putting up Union Jacks.

I've had a few digs at Gary Neville over on Twitter about his comments. However, I always try to think about how I would word things were I posting to my real life friends on Facebook. It's easy to throw around off-the-cuff remarks on Twitter, where everyone's a stranger, but on Facebook you're forced to be mindful of the people you work and live with. In the real world I have plenty of friends that are from minority backgrounds in one way or another - British-born Muslims, black and mixed-race people (some born here, some from overseas), Eastern Europeans. In fact, where I work the list of nationalities is endless: Poland, Romania, Eritrea, Nigeria, Latvia, Greece, the list goes on..

Anyway, when I think in this way it only heightens my feeling that Gary Neville is wrong. It doesn't bring me any closer to his "everything is rosy, and you're just a racist for complaining" worldview. I just think he's irresponsible, and is making things worse by throwing around the label racist.

Old Trafford

The capacity of Old Trafford - the football stadium where Gary Neville used to play - is 74,000. If they sell all 74,000 tickets for a game and someone tries to buy one more then the guy working at the ticket office has to say, "Sorry, we're sold out. No one else can enter the stadium."

The guy doesn't do this because he's racist towards the ticket buyer, or because he's filled with "HATE." He does it because he has a responsibility, and sometimes being responsible means making hard decisions. On the one hand he wants as many people to come to the game as possible. However, at the same time, he also has a duty to make sure the people inside the stadium are safe. So there's a balancing act, and trying to get that balance right means sometimes having to turn people away.

Ideally the whole world would be allowed into the stadium to watch the game, but in reality there are practical limits.

The Stadium Britannica

Of course, it's similar with countries. Ideally we'd just let everyone enter, but, in reality, there are restrictive factors ..lack of housing/infrastructure, fears over social cohesion, etc. We want a vibrant stadium, but we don't want a rowdy, violent one - where things are too overcrowded and the stewards can't control the numbers.

Again, it's a balancing act, and that means someone taking responsibility and at times saying, "Sorry, you can't enter."

Yes, it's mean. But it's also mean to turn a blind eye to homelessness, crime, ever-rising rents, and all the various other issues.

Back To Facebook

Anyway, back to posting on Facebook. Gary makes things worse, because:

a) He makes it difficult for governments to take responsibility - i.e. they can't ever say, "Sorry, you can't enter," for fear of being labelled racist. (Or, if the government is in fact too idealistic to take responsibility he provides cover for them.)

b) He's basically telling the numerous people that are from minority backgrounds, "Hey, this guy complaining about immigration rates, or putting up flags, he's racist and he hates you." Sowing more discord.

So, if I go and post on Facebook, my numerous minority friends will think, "Wow, I didn't realise he's actually a RACIST!, he must secretly hate me and not want me in the country." Not, "Oh, he wants someone responsible managing the ticket office." Which is the reality.

And this is the reality for the vast majority of the population. Yes, there are a teeny amount of genuinely racist people, but they're a tiny fraction. Most people just want policies that are practical not ideological.

It's perfectly natural that someone from another country, or from a minority background, will have a tendency to think, "They're talking about me," when they hear someone complaining about immigration. I'd think the same if I was in their shoes ..but most the time I'd be wrong. As, again, most people complaining see the issue as a practical/numbers issue, not a personal one.

People like Gary should be reassuring people that it isn't personal if they genuinely want to lessen social tensions. They should be explaining the practical limitations that all governments face and arguing for a balance. Not stirring up fears further by painting kumbaya rainbows on one side of the aisle and white Nazi bogeymen on the other.

It's in the interests of everyone here to want a safer stadium. Ultimately, homelessness and cost of living doesn't discriminate by colour, religion or nationality.