"When they looked at how often ingredients appeared in recipes and ranked them accordingly, they saw a precise mathematical relationship across the board between an ingredient's position on the list and how commonly used it was."
Not if you need to maintain any contact fields other than the (short) canned list Highrise offers. We could not use Highrise because of this. (I know nothing about Rails, but I wondered whether it might be related to their inability -- if it's not just refusal -- to add a feature that their users, judging by the forums when I was evaluating, were clamoring for.)
I was frustrated by the 37s attitude. "We don't comment on development plans" was a common refrain from their staff. So... no hints on where you're heading or whether there's any plan to add a feature I so desperately need? And the focus on simplicity over suitability to customer needs was also surprising.
"Use it or don't" seems to be their take on customer relations. It's their business and they can run it how they want and, yes, I can think of lots of rationalizations for the way they do things, but they're not a company I want to do business with. Maybe, as an earlier poster wrote, 92% of their customers are happy. I wonder how many potential customers they've lost.
Maybe it's a good thing: It leaves a place in the market for a better product, and maybe a better company.
"In 2004, a bread roll cost 40 cents. For the wheat that went into it, the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think about that?"
Am I supposed to be alarmed by this question? It looks to me to be an invitation to an interesting line of thougt. "Where'd the other 38 cents go?" is the obvious next question. Answering it would, I suppose, reveal other players in the production- and supply-chain, and would probably indicate that the farmer received a fair price. It might even lead one to consider other ideas like economies of scale and the role of industrialization in agriculture. And so on.
This article is almost comically biased. Replace a few pejoratives with antonyms and the author's unreasonableness becomes clear: In Texas, they're not "filling students with negative preconceptions and suspicions about businesses and the people who run them." No, they're "filling students with positive preconceptions and faith about businesses and the people who run them."
Isn't this a tautology?