Don't Toss Those Onion Scraps

Like most people, whenever I cut an onion for cooking, I've always thrown away the ends and the dry, papery skin that surrounds the fleshy, edible layers. However, this is in fact a big mistake. Although you cannot eat onion skin, it has a lot of flavor in it. You can keep a bag in your fridge or freezer into which you can put onion skins and the drier outer layers of the onion that you peel off. From time to time you can boil them down to produce a flavorful broth for cooking. Just tonight, I boiled some onion skins along with the bones from some chicken I cooked and stripped for soups and stir-fry. I got a fair amount of broth that filled the kitchen with a mouth-watering scent.

It's now in a stainless steel bowl in the refrigerator, cooling enough that I can pour it into peanut butter jars and put it into the freezer until I need it for soup or other cooking projects. Although some people also put the ends of their onions into the bag for cooking stock, you can also start new onions with them. Especially if an onion is beginning to sprout, you can set the top and bottom in a shallow dish of water and they will produce roots. Once you have a solid root network, you can transfer them into potting soil to establish themselves, and then plant them in your garden. You can harvest them as green onions, or you can leave them to set bulbs. When you harvest them, save the ends and start the cycle all over again. You can also grow an endless supply of green onions from a single bunch of store-bought green onions. Instead of using them all the way down to the roots, cut only the green parts and save the small white bulb to which the roots attach. Set them in water, and they will soon produce fresh leaves. At this point you can either plant them in your garden or you can keep them in water and harvest an endless crop of hydroponic green onions. You can even do this if you live in an apartment, as long as you have a window at which you get decent sunlight and where you either have a window ledge or room for a small table.

Remembering Angel Food Ministries

Over the past few days I've been sorting through some stacks of papers in my office area, in preparation for some repair work that needs to be done in it. As I was sorting and disposing, I came across a number of materials from Angel Food Ministries, a faith-based cooperative food buying system that allowed people to buy pre-packaged selections of food at a reduced price, via the sponsorship of local churches who collected the money and distributed the food. It worked because the parent organization pooled the contributions of hundreds of host sites and thousands of people to buy in bulk, directly from various food companies. Although some of the food came in retail boxes, a lot of it was in very plain packaging, further reducing the costs.

 It was particularly nice because there were no income qualifications, so if you were on the edge or had irregular income, you didn't have to worry about whether you qualified. Since it wasn't a distribution of a fixed pie of goods, you didn't have to worry whether you were taking food from those even more needy than yourself. In fact, because pooling money enabled the organizers to tap economies of scale that individual church food pantries couldn't have accessed, participating actually helped food become more available to the needy, and even made it possible to fund free boxes to the destitute.

And then, in 2011, everything came crashing down. I missed the September order cycle because we were going to be out of town on distribution Saturday, but when I went to their website in October to plan my order, I discovered that there would be no October distribution, and people's money for September was in the process of being refunded. The official explanation was financial trouble as a result of decreased participation, necessitating the discontinuation of the entire program.

However, that story was a fairy tale to comfort us. In truth, the leadership of the parent organization, Pastor Joe Wingo and his family, had been caught with their hands in the till by the Federal government. Several members of the Wingo family would ultimately be convicted in Federal court of various crimes, including money laundering and various forms of interference with a criminal investigation. It was a huge shame to discover that the leaders of an organization that so many deeply faithful people had come to believe in were in fact wolves in sheep's clothing, stealing in the name of the Lord.

 Looking over the materials with the benefit of hindsight, there were some odd warning signs. When I first began participating in 2008, each box of food came with a full-color eight-page magazine that included articles, recipes, and the next month's menus. At the end of 2009, it shrank to a single-sheet flyer with articles and recipes on one side, and the next month's menus on the back. During the last few months of the ministry's existence, it became nothing but a single-sided page of recipes, and the host sites had to print up their own copies of the menu sheet.

 Since the collapse of Angel Food Ministries, a number of organizations have tried to take its place, but none of them have been able to gain the sort of national reach that AFM possessed at its height. In 2018 we were introduced to a program called King Foods through one of the Lenten soup suppers that some of our local churches hold every Wednesday of Lent. Its menus and ordering systems looked very similar to AFM's, so we decided to give it a try and see how it worked out. Unfortunately, they had a catastrophic failure of the walk-in freezer at their central distribution site that month, and while they struggled to get their equipment replaced, they lost the momentum they had, and they appear to have ceased operations after November of 2018. Their Facebook page is still up, but their domain is now parked by GoDaddy.

 It's a real shame.

Guest Post by Me at According to Hoyt

My write-up of the changing economics of the convention scene went up today at the blog of Sarah A. Hoyt.

My husband and I run The Starship Cat, a small business selling at various kinds of fannish and nerdy events. For the most part we stay in the Midwest, although an exceptional show can take us further afield. As a result, we have an unusual perspective on the economy. As Jim Baen was fond of saying in reference to writers, we’re competing for “Joe’s beer money.” However, we’re doing it at events scattered widely across a region, rather than a single storefront, or an online store that can potentially reach the entire world. This means we’re selling in a wide variety of areas, but dealing directly with customers and observing their decision-making process as I interact with them. Also, convention dealers talk to each other, both at conventions (usually during set-up hours in the morning) and online in various public and private fora. We give each other heads-up information about venues and promoters, but we also let each other know how sales went at our shows. This year our company sold at fifteen conventions and two small outdoor events. Of our conventions, four were anime conventions, six were comic cons, one was a media con, two were traditional science fiction conventions, one was a pulp fiction convention, and one was a writers’ convention.

Read the rest at According to Hoyt.

Credit and Debt

One of the factors contributing to the severity of the Great Depression was the development of easy credit. Automobile loans made the first inroads against Americans' traditional resistance to consumer debt, since cars held their value over time and lenders could have confidence that a repossessed car would sell for enough to cover the defaulted loan.

From there, businesses began extending credit for other durable goods such as furniture and radios. However, unlike automobile loans, these loans were typically not paid off. Instead, as the family got within a few payments of the end, they'd decide to buy another item or two to make their home a little nicer. Because they'd have to requalify if they made a new note, they'd just add the new items to the existing note. Over time the debt would get spread onto a large number of possessions, many of which should in theory have been paid off.

At least some of the stock market bubble was driven by casual lending policies. It was possible to buy stocks with only ten percent of your own money and get the rest on credit, a practice known as buying on margin. This was allowed only because the market was going up steadily, but no one noticed that the practice of extensive leverage was disconnecting stock prices from their fundamentals. Eventually that bubble burst, resulting in "margin calls" as the value of people's stocks fell below the point at which they had the requisite amount of money invested. When they sold the stocks they could no longer afford to own, it resulted in a devolutionary spiral that brought down other forms of ersatz wealth based upon credit. As the economy contracted, people who could no longer keep up with their consumer loan payments often lost all their household furnishings, since all the items were on the same note and thus collateral against it.

Similarly, our nation's current financial woes have their roots in the unwise expansion of credit. In the 1990's, laws were passed to encourage renters to become buyers on the theory that neighborhoods of homeowners were more stable. However, the promoters of these laws confused cause and effect, not understanding that homeowners were more stable because their middle-class values encouraged both home ownership and social stability. Simply giving people the money to buy a house did not give them the value-sets and habits of mind that make for stable middle-class neighborhoods. Furthermore, many of the loans were of the riskiest sort, and the people taking them out often were stretching far beyond their means to cover the monthly payments.

Fast forward to 2008. The Global War on Terror and speculation in the petroleum markets had driven gas prices at the pump to record heights. Many people were paying four dollars or more per gallon for gas. Suddenly people were deciding whether to buy gas or pay their mortgages, and decided that they needed to get to work now, and could hope to catch back up on their mortgages later. It produced a rash of foreclosures in the areas where speculation and refinancing had created a bubble which drove prices far beyond the fundamentals. From there the tightly interconnected mortgage securities markets began to unravel, leading to a rapid crash in the housing market and massive consequences throughout the economy.

However, being overextended and even underwater on mortgages is not the only debt problem facing America. Easy personal credit, especially credit cards and other unsecured revolving accounts, have led many American families into a nightmare of chronic debt that is unsustainable. The percentage of Americans carrying balances on their credit cards and paying only the minimums are at record highs. Even people who consider themselves frugal are playing musical chairs with their credit card debt, using one card to pay off another or paying their utilities and other routine bills with credit cards.

In the 1930's people discovered just how deep the rabbit hole of debt went. It looks like we're about to see yet another round of it, as the bills come due for the faux prosperity we tried to keep up while fighting a two-front war -- right in time to deal with another fanatic tyrant.

Crossposted at The Starship Cat.

What the Collapse Looks Like

Over at The Burning Platform, Survival Sullivan has some notes on what life will be like after an economic collapse:

If you have been waiting for a public announcement or news headline to let you know that an economic collapse has begun, you are in for the surprise of your life. If history in other countries and in Detroit, Michigan is any indication, there won’t be an announfcement. An economic collapse tends to sneak up on a city, region, or country gradually over time. In some cases, the arrival of an economic collapse is so gradual that most people living in it aren’t even aware of it at first.

Things just get gradually worse, often so gradually that people and families adjust as best they can until one day they actually realize that it’s not just their home or their neighborhood that has been hit so hard financially, it’s everyone. By that time, it’s often too late to take preventative action.

In March of 2011, Detroit’s population was reported as having fallen to 713,777, the lowest it had been in a century and a full 25% drop from 2000. In December 2011, the state announced its intention to formally review Detroit’s finances. In May of 2013, almost two years later, the city is deemed “clearly insolvent” and in July of 2013, the state representative filed a Chapter 9 bankruptcy petition for Motor City. Detroit became one of the biggest cities to file bankruptcy in history.

Read the rest at The Burning Platform

Crossposted at The Starship Cat

The Siren Song of False Economy

When the money is tight, the first impulse is to cut back on non-essential spending. However, sometimes things that don't look essential will turn out to be far more expensive in the long run.

Two of the most common false economies are skimping on health care and on vehicle maintenance. However, there are other false economies. For instance, people buy cheaper cuts of meat and end up wasting them because they don't know how to cook them properly. This situation can become even more complicated when buying for a family, because some family members may flatly refuse to eat unfamiliar foods. Food that will only end up scraped from plate to garbage can is no savings.

Unfortunately, false economies are not always obvious, and often we realize them only in retrospect. For instance, there are times that it may look financially prudent to repair a vehicle, but in fact it just traps you in a vicious cycle of nickle-and-dime repairs to the point you can't afford to get rid of it. Trying to get by with inadequate or inappropriate equipment can be another ugly false economy.

The best thing we can do is try to learn from other people's mistakes so we don't repeat them.

Great Job Breaking It, Hero

The European Union, in typical European fashion, has just placed a crushing burden on every small business owner, just when we can least afford it. In case nobody in the hallowed halls of Antwerp haven't noticed, we're in the middle of an economic downturn. That means that jobs are hard to come by, and it becomes all the more essential that people be able to make a living without having to first obtain the permission of an employer -- which means being able to start and operate your own small business in order to make money selling to carefully chosen niche markets that are too small and specific for the big operators to bother with.

The rise of the Internet has meant that small business operators can tap such markets not just in their immediate locale, but around the world -- until this utter travesty known as VAT-MOSS (Value-added tax mini one-stop shop) has come forth. It places documentation burdens on online sellers of digital goods that, while trivial for big players such as Amazon.com, are crushing for the little guy who just wants to bring in enough money to keep a roof over his head since he got laid off at his formerly well-paying job, without being a burden on society.

Chris Meadows has a summary of just how impossible it is for small businesses to comply with these new regulations without incurring crushing burdens.

The truly ironic thing about it is that it came about as the result of smaller players complaining that big internationals such as Amazon.com were gaming the system, locating their European headquarters in places such as Luxembourg which had unusually low VAT and as a result not paying their fair share comparative to smaller players who were more restricted in their ability to relocate. Which is yet another example of "be careful what you wish for, you might get it."

Because of the way the law is written, there are even questions about whether it could pull American businesses into its net. In theory it's possible, but in practice, an American who does only a tiny amount of business with EU citizens and has no plans to ever travel to any EU member state probably has little chance of running afoul of an EU bureaucrat determined to make an example of them.

Still, it is yet another example of  how over-regulation is choking economic growth. Yes, there do need to be some basic laws and regulations, ground rules to make sure that the selfish and manipulative don't prey upon the weak. But not this maze of rules that are literally impossible to comply with or enforce, for the simple reason that the people writing them have no concept of how they will actually work when put into practice.