Marmite Has Vitamin B12

I went to the supermarket and purchased Marmite today.



Marmite is fortified with vitamin B12 as well as iron.



It's important that vegans get vitamin B12 from supplements or fortified food because there is no vitamin B12 in plant food.

If taking supplements, aim to take between 100 to 300 micrograms of vitamin B12 per day.

Although plant food can provide vitamin B12 if it has been contaminated with bacteria from soil, plant food nowadays is washed clean thereby removing vitamin B12.

Meat from grass-fed animals contain vitamin B12 as the bacteria that produces vitamin B12 from the dirt on grass is consumed by the animal. However, nowadays livestock is fed with processed grains, and meat from factory farms typically do not have vitamin B12. As such, 90% of vitamin B12 supplements are fed to livestock, not humans.

http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/carnivores-need-vitamin-b12-supplements/2013/10/30

Only Passive Income Can Break the Shackles of the 9-to-5

I am trying not to feel any emotion at work. I just need to remember that I am there only to make money. All I need to do is survive. I just need to do what they say. It will only be about five more years and then I think I will retire. My manager doesn’t seem to speak to me much, but this is nothing unusual. He is that sort of person. It doesn’t really bother me that much. If I get no work, I can always find things to do.

I don't want a promotion. It's more effort than it's worth. For the same reason, I won't try to change jobs. Going to interviews and writing up a resume is just too much for me. I will just go to work and avoid trouble. I will move where they move me. I will dedicate the rest of my years in this job trying to risk manage everything. That is, I will imagine every possible way things can go wrong and I will take action to make sure it doesn't happen. That's what everyone else seems to do anyway. There is definitely a risk-averse culture in my workplace.

For about a year now, I’ve been saving up cash because I figure I’d want to buy a house or maybe I’d want to run an online business. However, I’ve found recently that an online business is just hard. I think it’s because I work all full-time and when I’m not working I’m just tired, so it’s difficult. I will keep trying to find a way to make money online, but so far the only thing that has proven itself is investments in ETFs, so this week plowed about $35,000 into ETFs. In particular, I am investing in ETFs that pay very high income. I am going all in on passive income. I see passive income as the only reliable route to freedom, and there is nothing I want more than freedom right now. I have even borrowed money from my margin loan account into order to invest into these ETFs. I am not concerned about borrowing money to invest in ETFs. I figure that I have so much money in my superannuation fund (retirement fund) now that I can afford to carry around debt until I am sixty or whenever I get access to my superannuation. When I do get this superannuation money, it should be over $1 million, which will easily pay the $50k or so worth of margin loan debt I will have.

The bottom line is to keep doing what I’ve always been doing, which is to go to work, to work hard and avoid trouble. I will be thrifty. I have allowed myself to spend my passive income and a little bit of my salary (about 15%), but that is it. It will not be too hard now because I am producing quite a bit of passive income. Over time, as my passive income increases, it will get easier. I really have little to be concerned about. Everything will take care of itself if I follow the system.

If there is anything wrong with me it is that I am too polite, and I will need to be careful I don’t give away my money to others. I must not allow myself to be manipulated. I will need to be strong. I love to talk about investing. It really is my only passion. Of course, talking about money is dangerous.

Anyway, I have a purpose and a system now. I go all in passive income. As time goes by, my passive income rises and my life gets more comfortable. Once it starts getting really comfortable, then after about 2020 I will start to semi-retire, which I suppose will mean I will take longer holidays off from work. I will not be afraid of taking leave with half pay. Maybe by then I will hate my job so much I will just quit. I don’t know. We will see.

How to Stop Annoying People Calling You

For some reason, someone from the Australian Stock Report rang me trying to sell me investment advice. The investment advice costs about $1000 per year, which is a rip off. Anyway, I tried to argue with this guy, but he didn't really address what I said. He just talked about a bunch of unrelated things. I suppose the logical thing for me to do would be to just hang up, but I suppose one of my personality flaws is that I am too polite. He said he was going to call me in a few days.

I have an app on my phone called Truecaller that I used to block his number. This is a great app. The problem is that marketers can easily turn off caller ID thereby making the caller show up as "private number." The Truecaller app has an option to block all private numbers, which I activated for a while.

The only problem is that my mother's phone, when she calls me, shows up as a private number. I've tried very hard to turn this off on my mother's phone, but nothing has worked, so unless I want to block my mother, I need to accept private calls, which means I am vulnerable to spammers and marketers.

What I will do when I receive a private number is simply pick up the phone but say nothing. I will wait for the other person to speak. If it's a voice I recognise, I'll keep talking. If it's a voice I don't recognise, I'll just hang up.

Linda McCartney Vegetarian Sausages from Woolworths

I was browsing through the local Woolworths one day and noticed vegan sausages on sale. These are made by Linda McCartney and these sausages are suitable for vegans, meaning they have no meat, no dairy, no eggs.

Six sausages cost about $6, so that is about $1 per sausage. This strikes me as expensive, but I'm not too sure what the market price of sausages are given I don't normally buy or eat sausages.



I checked the ingredients and noticed it was mostly made from wheat protein. It is also soy free. The protein percentage at 22% is quite high. As a comparison, chicken is 27% protein.



I had the sausages cooked up with a salad. When I first saw the sausages, I was concerned about how rough the surface of the sausages were. Normally sausages are smooth.



Even since I became vegan, I've never had sausages, so this was a big moment for me! In fact, when I was a meat eater, sausages were my favourite food. If there is anything I hated about meat, it's bone. Fish was the worst because often fish is laced with small bones. I'd have nightmares about getting small bits of bone lodged in my throat and I'd need to get my neck cut open in a hospital to remove the bone. Lamb or beef was usually too hard for my teeth to tear. Chicken was usually dry. Sausages, on the other hand, were uniform and because they were packed with herbs and maybe some other questionable chemicals (such as ammonia and nitrates) they tasted good.



When I tasted the vegan sausages, I was surprised at how good they were. If I were to serve this to most people, I'd be sure most of then would not know that it is meatless.

The texture was very nice. It has a very nice sausage-like taste.





Eating a salad with vegan meat was very nice. I think there is something very satisfying about having something warm (sausages) mixed with something cold (salads).

Most people, in my opinion, do not want animals to suffer. This is why slaughterhouses are hidden. People do not want to look at the atrocities that occur in these factories. However, people often want warm food that is high in calories and meat is the cheapest, tastiest, and most convenient product for that.

However, vegan meat, in my opinion, is now tasty enough that most people would switch if the product were more widely available, if it were marketed better, and if it were cheap enough.

One reason why vegan meat is not cheap is because few of it is sold. For companies to make back their expenses on low quantity sold, they need to raise prices. Vegans should support vegan meat producers because more demand for their product should increase competition, lower prices, and bring vegan meats into the mainstream.

Another problem vegan meat faces is the fact that the meat and dairy industries in many countries are heavily subsidised by governments. A significantly amount of taxpayer money goes towards propping up the meat and dairy industry ($38 billion in America alone). This is a problem that needs to be fixed at the political level. When you vote, think of the animals.

Debt Seen By Most as Harmless

There has been a study done that shows a correlation between a person's credit score and his or her ability to be in a committed relationship.

I have no idea what my credit score is, but I am fascinated by how many people are obsessed over the number as if their ability to pay a debt is very important.

I believe the reason why so many people believe they must get a good credit score is because they believe that it is inevitable that they will go into debt in their lives, and if they are going to go into debt anyway, why not pay a lower interest rate by having a good credit score?

All this underlines how successful banks are in duping people into believing that they absolutely must go into debt. Most people today see debt as a normal part of living.

I see it different. Debt is a promise by you to pay someone in the future. You are binding or enslaving your future self. It is an act that goes against personal freedom.

Of course, you consent to debt, but think about how you thought and behaved ten or twenty years ago. Chances are it is nothing like how you behave today. As humans we change. When you think about who you are today and who you will be decades into the future, we may as well be talking about completely different people.

The credit score is a measure of how good of a slave you are, how well you can submit and grovel at the feet of the powerful. A high credit score is nothing to be proud of, in my opinion.

Supercharger Emporium

I was feeling hungry for lunch and so decided to try eating at Supercharger in the Emporium food court in Melbourne.

This was the first time I'd been to this place. The menu looked complicated. They presented two pieces of paper. One allowed you to make your own meal. Another piece of paper had four different set meals. However, the set menu was set up in a way that was very unclear. When it was all explained to me, I understood it. I actually thought that the menu was referring to many different meals when really they were just referring to different aspects of each meal (did that make sense?). Have a look at Supercharger's menu at Zomato to see for yourself.

Anyway, for newbies, I recommend you get a set meal. They have names like "immunity" or "strength" depending on what you want the food to do to you. I assume the "immunity" meal makes you immune to sickness.

You pay around $14 and you get a number. After waiting around a bit, you receive a tray usually with three bowls. There is usually a soup, some creamy mixture, and a big main bowl with salads, edamame, noodles, and all sorts of other things that I don't know the name of (luckily I took a photo).

All in all, it was very tasty and definitely very filling! I highly recommend it.

The Positives of YouTube Brawl Videos

There's a guilty pleasure in watching a brawl on YouTube. Maybe there is something inherent in us humans to pay close attention to conflict.

Nowadays, whenever there is a brawl, people take out their smartphones and start recording, and at first I thought this was a sign that people were so keen to put up videos or pictures on their Facebook or Twitter feeds that they forget to actually do something to stop the fight. However, people suddenly filming brawls may actually be a good thing.

In the old days, fights were like rapes in that it was one person's word against another. Now because many fights are filmed with smartphones, it helps the police and maybe even judges in a courtroom. The cop who recently shot a black man in the back probably would have gotten away with it were it not for him being filmed (not via a smartphone). He is now indicted for murder.

With wearables technology such as Google Glass and the Narrative Clip allowing people to record anything at all times, privacy may be a thing of the past. We must assume that there will always be a camera on us. This can be seen as a negative, but it may also be seen as a positive. It means we will all be accountable for our actions because what we do will be watched by the world. Whether the world will judge us fairly is another issue.