When you've got a cold (very popular around this time of year!) or stomach problems, eating might be the last thing you feel like doing. To recover as fast as possible, though, you need to nourish your body even more than when you're healthy. To that end, Greatist has compiled a list of the best and worst foods for when you're sick.
    
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You know the drill. You clean your faucets, turn your attention away for a moment, and they're spotty again. Okay, maybe it doesn't happen quite that fast, but it sometimes seems that way. To help keep them shiny longer, try rubbing down your faucets with wax paper after their next cleaning.
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You can never have enough diamonds. If you’re Signet Jewelers that’s an accurate statement. The parent company of Kay Jewelers and Jared the Galleria of Jewelry is adding to its inventory by purchasing Zale Corporation, the parent company of jewelry store Zales.
Under the $1.4 billion deal Signet Jewelers will pay $21 in per share in cash for Zale Corporation, Forbes reports.
Signet Jewelers officials say the purchase of Zale will strengthen the Signet portfolio and create better choices for consumers.
“The addition of Zale to the Signet family is consistent with our long-term growth strategy and leverages our combined operating expertise to create better choices for our customers, new opportunities for our employees, and makes us a more attractive partner to our vendors,” Signet CEO Mike Barnes said in a statement Wednesday morning. “In addition, it allows us to better optimize our balance sheet, creating long-term value for our shareholders.”
Signet operates 1,400 stores in the United States and 500 in Britain, while Dallas-based Zale has 1,680 stores in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.
So, does this mean more cheesy commercials ala “He went to Jared” or “Every kiss begins with Kay”? It’s to early to tell, but we’re already bracing for the over abundance of lovey-dovey, eye roll inducing jewelry commercials.
Signet Jewelers Acquiring Zales Owner in $1.4 Billion Deal [Forbes]
Online Paralegal Programs says that most avoidable arrests come from police trickery and intimidation, which lead you to consent to a search or admit guilt. Know your rights and how to avoid police tricks with this handy infographic.
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Dear Lifehacker,
I'm going to be traveling soon and I need to take my laptop with me. How can I make sure it's as safe as possible? I won't always have my own desk, and sometimes I'll have to work from public places. How can I protect my laptop and the data that's on it when I use it away from home?
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Can someone please find Jim Gaffigan and hold his hand while he hears this news? After a beef processing plant announced a recall last week of almost nine million pounds of meat “unfit for human food,” Nestlé has announced it’s pulling certain flavors and batches of Hot Pockets from the shelf. And yes, I can hear the jokes you’re making.
Your personal feelings on the edibleness of Hot Pockets aside, Nestlé USA’s Prepared Foods Division announced that it’s voluntarily pulling Hot Pockets brand Philly Steak and Cheese in three different pack sizes as well as Hot Pockets Croissant Crust Philly Steak and Cheese, in the two-pack box.
Those two products are the only products involved in the nationwide recall, the company notes, and it’s linked to Rancho’s recall (“which affects many companies,” Nestlé makes sure to point out).
The company says though it didn’t buy any meat directly from Rancho, it took a look into its supply chain to see if any other businesses it deals with did so.
From this review, we have confirmed that a small quantity of meat from Rancho was used at Nestlé’s Chatsworth, California production operation, a facility devoted entirely to HOT POCKETS® brand sandwiches. The affected batches of the two varieties in our range of HOT POCKETS® brand sandwiches are being removed from the marketplace.
Anyone who purchased affected batches should not eat them, but instead return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. No illnesses have been reported yet, says the United States Department of Agriculture. You can call Nestlé Consumer Services at (800) 392-4057.
The list of affected products is below:
Also, if you’ve never heard Jim Gaffigan riff on Hot Pockets, now is the time:
One of the PacSun shirts the shopper purchased because she felt they were indecent.
That’s what a woman in Orem, Utah, did when she recently spend $567 at a local PacSun clothing store to snap up all the retailer’s tees featuring half-dressed women on them.
It appears that the particular line that the shopper has a problem with is the V/SUAL Heartbreakers from Vans Style, which use photographs of women in lingerie on the shirts.
The woman tells the Provo Daily Herald that she came across a window display for the new line and was not pleased with what she saw.
“I had a conversation with the store manager,” she explains. “She said she did refuse to put the accompanying banner up with the display because it was much worse, but that she couldn’t take down the T-shirts without talking to her corporate office, but the promo was over Wednesday anyway. She said she told them it might not go over well.”
Management at the mall, which does have a rule against vulgar displays, says that other customers had complained about the PacSun shirts.
“This is hard to police because of freedom of speech,” said the mall manager, who says it is up to the Orem city attorney to determine whether the display violates local obscenity ordinances.
“That sounds all well and good,” says the concerned shopper. “But why would they have to go to the city attorney when it’s obviously against the mall lease.”
And so she purchased $567 worth of the shirts, which she plans to return to the store for a refund one day before the return window closes.
“I hope my efforts will inspire others to speak up within their communities,” she tells the AP. “You don’t have to purchase $600 worth of T-shirts, but you can express your concerns to businesses and corporations who promote the display of pornography to children.”
Of course, this sort of effort also has a tendency to backfire. It’s unlikely that most people would have heard or cared about a limited run T-shirt collection at a 600-chain retailer without this story going public. PacSun may have to refund her the $576 when she returns the shirt, but she’s unintentionally given the store many thousands of dollars worth of free publicity.
It’s nice to hear about a battle of consumer vs. bank that ends with a consumer victory. Better still when it means that the consumer gets to stay in their home, which they were in danger of losing to foreclosure. That’s the heartwarming story of one California couple who fought back in court.
They spoke to a local TV station with the mission of letting other California homeowners know that they too have a weapon against wrongful foreclosure. Anyone can sue. They didn’t name their bank on the air, but did explain how after the confusion of the housing bubble and packaging of mortgage-backed securities, sometimes it isn’t immediately clear who owns the mortgage on a given house. It’s possible that the entity foreclosing on a house has no right to do so.
“This is of course something the banks want no one to know about,” their attorney explained to the TV station, “because otherwise you would have everyone running to the court trying to file a claim.”
Homeowners in other states may not be so lucky: as you may remember, California passed legislation a few years ago that gives homeowners special protection from abusive lenders and potentially wrongful foreclosures.
Rancho Cordova Couple Turns Tables On Lender’s Foreclosure Attempt [CBS Sacramento]
(KSPR-TV)
In a video that’s lighting up the Internet recently, fans at a College of the Ozarks basketball game go absolutely crazy when 54-year-old Michael hits the three-point shot perfectly, without being able to actually see the basket.
As if that wasn’t impressive enough, KSPR-TV has a follow-up story that shows just how many setbacks he’s had to deal with, and how he’s triumphing over all those obstacles.
While playing around on the court for the piece, the man nailed three-pointers left and right. That’s partly due to his involvement with a group called Champion Athletes of the Ozarks, a group that works “with individuals with all types of disabilities, all types of developmental disabilities,” explains a rep for the organization. Members play all kinds of sports, including baskteball.
“He would never have needed our program had the head injury not happened,” she explains of Michael.
Six years ago he had a series of falls that led to him going blind, and then in 2010 he lost much of his mental capacity. In 2013 he joined up with the program, and has been doing things that just can’t be copied.
“I know that if I do my best then everything else will be okay,” he says. “I like basketball so much that a lot of times it’s just being with the other athletes and thinking about how great it is to be able to play basketball.”
And then there’s the prize — free value meals from McDonald’s for a year. He says he doesn’t have much of an idea of what a year is but heck if he’s not going to enjoy it.
Check out the videos below to see his shot as well as KSPR-TV’s interview with Michael, who again, is better at basketball than you. Pretty awesome stuff.
Blind man who hit 3-pointer has incredible story [KSPR-TV)
(coffeego)
Officials with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau say rising student debt, along with its implications on the housing market, could prove to be one of the most painful aftershocks of the Great Recession, the Washington Post reports.
Housing experts say the decline has to do with student loan debt carried by prospective homeowners. Student loan debt has tripled from a decade ago; an unsurprising figure considering tuition continues to increase year after year. Today, 71% of students leave college with an average of $29,400 in student loan debt.
Consumers with student loan debt face an uphill battle when it comes to purchasing a home thanks in part to a new federal rules that went into effect last month. The new rule gives mortgage lenders broad legal protections as long as they do not approve loans for buyers whose total months debt exceeds 43% of their monthly gross income.
Additionally, the Federal Housing Administration is looking to scrap a waiver that helped many first-time home buyers in the past. Currently, the agency allows mortgage lenders it works with to ignore student loans debt that’s been deferred a year or more when assessing a borrower’s eligibility for a loan.
Not only does higher student loan debt make for more high-risk borrowers, but higher monthly payments on loans means more consumers are struggling to scrap together enough money for a down payment. The National Association of Realtors reported that 54% of first-time home buyers said student loans made it tough to save money.
A recent Georgetown graduate told the Post that with $75,000 in student debt she struggled for years to come up with a down payment on a condominium. Finally, her parents came to her rescue.
Fellow first-time homebuyers are finding other ways to reduce their debt, such as going to work in developing countries for tax benefits or selling advertising on their graduation caps.
Student debt may hurt housing recovery by hampering first-time buyers [The Washington Post]
There’s customer service, and then there’s sparing no expense to make sure your customer’s wedding isn’t ruined by flying your own daughter to a tropical destination so she can hand deliver the groom’s pants. That’s called dedication.
A Minnesota clothier went way, way above and beyond when he put his daughter on a plane to Costa Rica carrying $500 suit pants that his groom customer had forgotten. He needed them for his wedding and FedEx, UPS and airline package services couldn’t help, reports the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
The daughter works for her dad’s men’s store and took off Sunday morning at around 6 a.m., flying 11 hours to Costa Rica with the pants. She then waited an hour for a driver and bumped over back-roads to get around and washout before successfully arriving at the beachfront resort to deliver the traveling pants in time for the Monday wedding.
The happy couple hadn’t even realized the pants had been left behind until the store owner contacted the bride through Facebook, and of course, said they weren’t expecting such a special delivery. Turns out the rest of the suit had obscured the hanger that should’ve held the pants, so no one realized they simply weren’t there.
“We are incredibly speechless,” the bride emailed.
“We just want you to have best wedding ever,” the clothier replied.
“Now, thanks to you and your family, we will!” she responded. “I cried. You, Sir, are incredible!”
Sounds like it’s all in a day’s work for the store owner, who added, “We just want to take care of people so they have a great experience. It’s a big day for them. We certainly weren’t going to disappoint them.”
While of course there’s no way that every single business owner could afford such extreme acts of customer service, it’s heartwarming to know that there are those out there willing to literally, go the distance. Or at least have their daughters do so.
“I feel like I am carrying treasure through the jungle,” she said of her trek. “It’s pretty intense, but feels pretty great.”
Talk about customer service: Clothier delivers forgotten pants to groom in Costa Rica [Minnesota Star-Tribune]
Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth?
—Josh (Bolton, MA)
This answer is pretty straightforward. We can look up the size of the world's paint industry, extrapolate backward to figure out the total amount of paint produced. We'd also need to make some assumptions about how we're painting the ground. Note: When we get to the Sahara desert, I recommend not using a brush.
But first, let's think about different ways we might come up with a guess for what the answer will be. In this kind of thinking—often called Fermi estimation—all that matters is getting in the right ballpark; that is, the answer should have about the right number of digits. In Fermi estimation, you can round[1]Using the formula \(\text{Fermi}(x) = 10^{\text{round}(log_{10}x)}\), meaning that 3 rounds to 1 and 4 rounds to 10. all your answers to the nearest order of magnitude:
Let's suppose that, on average, everyone in the world is responsible for the existence of two rooms, and they're both painted. My living room has about 50 square meters of paintable area, and two of those would be 100 square meters. 7.15 billion people times 100 square meters per person is a little under a trillion square meters—an area smaller than Egypt.
Let's make a wild guess that, on average, one person out of every thousand spends their working life painting things. If I assume it would take me three hours to paint the room I'm in,[2]This is probably optimistic, especially if there's an internet connection in the room. and 100 billion people have ever lived, and each of them spent 30 years painting things for 8 hours a day, we come up with 150 trillion square meters ... just about exactly the land area of the Earth.
How much paint does it take to paint a house? I'm not enough of an adult to have any idea, so let's take another Fermi guess.
Based on my impressions from walking down the aisles, home improvement stores stock about as many light bulbs as cans of paint. A normal house might have about 20 light bulbs, so let's assume a house needs about 20 gallons of paint.[3]These are very rough estimates. Sure, that sounds about right.
The average US home costs about \$200,000. Assuming each gallon of paint covers about 300 square feet, that's a square meter of paint per \$300 of real estate. I vaguely remember that the world's real estate has a combined value of something like \$100 trillion,[4]Citation: This really boring dream I had once. which suggests there's about 300 billion square meters of paint on the world's real estate. That's about one New Mexico.
Of course, both of the building-related guesses could be overestimates (lots of buildings are not painted) or underestimates (lots of things that are not buildings[5]EXAMPLES OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT BUILDINGS: Ducks, M&Ms, cars, the Sun, cuttlefish, microchips, Macklemore, lightning, goat blood, zeppelins, tapeworms, pickle jars, those sticks you use to toast marshmallows, alligators, tuning forks, minotaurs, Perseid meteors, ballots, crude oil, sponsored tweets, and catapults that throw handfuls of engagement rings. are painted) But from these wild Fermi estimates, my guess would be that there probably isn't enough paint to cover all the land.
So, how did Fermi do?
According to the report The State of the Global Coatings Industry, the world produced 34 billion liters of paints and coatings in 2012.
There's a neat trick that can help us here. If some quantity—say, the world economy—has been growing for a while at an annual rate of n—say, 3% (0.03)—then the most recent year's share of the whole total so far is \(1-\tfrac{1}{1+n}\), and the whole total so far is the most recent year's amount times \(1+\tfrac{1}{n}\).
If we assume paint production has, in recent decades, followed the economy and grown at about 3% per year, that means the total amount of paint produced equals the current yearly production times 34.[6]\((1+\tfrac{1}{0.03})\) That comes out to a little over a trillion liters of paint. At 30 square meters per gallon,[7]"Square meters per gallon" is a pretty obnoxious unit, but I think it's not quite as bad as acre-foot (a foot by a chain by a furlong), which is an actual unit used in technical papers I was trying to read this week. that's enough to cover 9 trillion square meters—about the area of the United States.
So the answer is no; there's not enough paint to cover the Earth's land, and—at this rate—probably won't be enough until the year 2100.
Score one for Fermi estimation.
Instant gratification usually wins out with kids, and unfortunately with a lot of adults. But teaching the time value of money when they're young gives children tools to cope with that primal urge we all experience to "buy now."
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Look, Sodastreams are great for their convenience and ubiquity, but there are some drawbacks. For starters, you can only use them to carbonate water. On top of that, the cost of the replacement CO2 cartridges (which you need to keep yourself "in bubbles") is higher than it needs to be. We've explored other systems that let you carbonate cocktails, but they're prohibitively expensive and very inconvenient. We knew there had to be a better way.
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