It looks to me like the U.S beef industry is too dumb to understand that they have a serious public relations problem on their hands, with the continued practice of cycling slaughtered cow proteins back to cattle as feed. Simply from standpoint of public relations this looks like an industry set on putting a gun to its own head.
Here's a tip -- eat wild salmon and skip the farm raised stuff. I particularly recommend Copper River sockeye salmon which run through the summer months. Sockeye, of course, is the finest tasting of all the salmon species. Washington State sockeye are just as excellent, but these are much harder to find outside of that fabulous state. Even my father -- the great King salmon fisher himself -- will head off to the grocery store to buy himself some fresh deep red sockeye salmon. And who can blame him.
There's an interesting post on drug expiration dates from Truck and Barter, including this little nugget from the AMA:
PhRMA [Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America] notes that most innovator [non-generic] drug products that are close to expiration can be returned to the manufacturer for credit.
Who the heck knew?
Bainbridge has a good one on mad cow disease and regulation (via the Carnival of Capitalists). Quotable:
There is no perfect solution here. The inherent inadequacies of regulation cannot justify ignoring demonstrated market failures, but both liberty and efficiency values counsel that we view any regulatory regime with a skeptical eye. A world-weary sigh is about the best option I can come up with. On food safety, as with many other issues, I trust neither markets nor regulators .. So what's for dinner? I'm going to go on eating beef, but I'm going to buy organically farmed and vegetarian fed beef whenever possible (even if I'm skeptical about the veracity of those labels).
UPDATE: Dan Drezner has more helpful thoughts on Mad Cows and Regulations.
A reply from Clyde Crews to Chris Caldwell's knee-jerk response to SPAM. A key issue -- will the utopian mentalitiy of top-down out-of-thin-air "design" trump open-ended evolutionary adaptation?
The Internet wasn't originally designed to be the mass commercial and consumer medium that it is today. If one were to design a commercial network today from the bottom up, it would probably incorporate authentication of the senders of e-mail. That seems to be something law cannot do. Now that we're in midstream, we wonder if law can get us there, or must technology do it? Might legislation even impede that end? .. Such major overhaul of the Net architecture has been likened to widening all the nation's roads six inches. It is a monumental undertaking. But if it truly is the case that lack of authentication is at the root of the spam problem, it's also likely that legislation doesn't directly solve it. It may be that a system in which originators of messages remain anonymous is altogether inappropriate for a commercial information society of tomorrow. If so, neither is it appropriate to expect law to accomplish what ultimately must be a technological and market undertaking.
If you think about this, it should be clear the today's Weekly Standard "conservatives" are missing the central gene which any true conservative should have -- a profound sense for the significance of the fact that real-life -- including technological life -- has evolved through undesigned processes. And that the dictator's eye view from no-where utterly detached from the adaptive process of the social organism promises not some sort of top-down miracle, but a botched constriction of the decentralized adjustment processes that allows for piece-meal improvement on the part of folks who know what they are doing and how things actually work.
UPDATE: Caldwell is all wrong about SPAM and internet taxes, as explained here and here.