CIRCLE WITH A DOT

The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum was an excellent book, though the topic is infuriating. It covers the history around attempts to get food safety legislation passed in the US in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, particularly a central figure in a department that latter became the FDA. If you remember learning about Upton Sinclair and the meatpacking industry horrors of that era, that’s covered here, but there’s a much broader look that covers all sorts of OTHER food safety nightmares.

Disappointing how many of the food manufacturers named as being phenomenal assholes still exist today…

Just a moment...

(bookshop.org)

#books

@blogdiva PayPal is also sent SKU level data from merchants when you pay that way, i.e., a list of the items you are buying.

When a normal credit card transaction is sent for processing, NOT through PayPal, SKU level data is very often not included unless the POS and the gateway/processor support what’s known as Level III data (amongst other things) and the card is the right type (generally corporate purchasing type cards). But lots of merchants don’t send that even if something is a purchase card because the don’t have the integration to do so.

PayPal always gets the SKU data though as far as I know. Also if you buy, say, a book from them, they know the name of the book, not just that it was a book.

@APBBlue Very pretty! I love metallics.

@sidereal I also despise the related “I know you listed this on the budget for spending in October and you don’t have enough team members to do it earlier anyway, but you didn’t spend it by July so we are giving the approved budget money to someone else.”

@ajn142 Oooof. Is anything NOT an endpoint?

@ai6yr I don’t think it is. (And have done it myself. Someone’s entire personality turned into gushing about LLMs and I had no interest in reading it.)