As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.Carr makes an excellent point. One has to add some common sense to navigation systems. I used a TomTom in Europe last year. I found it very helpful - mostly, however, when we decided to wander around. The navigation system would then provide a route back to the hotel (which I had added as a predefined point prior to our departure).But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.
Scores of villages have been overrun by cars and lorries whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by their satellite navigation systems. The International Herald Tribune reports that the parish council of Barrow Gurney has even requested, fruitlessly, that the town be erased from the maps used by the makers of navigation devices.
A research group in the Netherlands last month issued a study documenting the phenomenon and the resulting risk of accidents. It went so far as to say that GPS systems can turn drivers into “kid killers.”
If there's a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it's security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It's the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all -- that's right, all -- internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word "Orwellian" feels too mild.
The article (now online here) contains this passage:
In order for cyberspace to be policed, internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: 'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"
I'm sure they have that saying in their business. And it's precisely why, when people in their business are in charge of government, it becomes a police state. If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.
These portraits were made in a portable studio that was hauled from fair to fair in California and Arizona between 1976 and 1980. The studio was complete with darkroom and a shooting stage and it took a crew of three to run it: a shooter (me), a front person to handle customers and a darkroom person to develop and print the 4x5 inch negative. The entire process, when going smoothly, took about fifteen minutes.
NATE HAGENS is an editor of The Oil Drum, an online community that seeks to raise awareness about energy issues. A Ph.D. candidate in Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, Hagens’s particular areas of interest are the principles of net energy and the bio-physiological factors that drive our energy demand.MATT SAVINAR is the editor and writer of Life After the Oil Crash, a blog which paints a bleak picture of what life on earth will look like when natural oil supplies run out. Savinar recently received his J.D. from the University of California at Hastings College of the Law, and his work is quoted extensively on the floor of the United States Congress.
One article in this month’s issue of Texas Monthly centers on Matthew Simmons, a Houston investment banker described as the most fervent apostle behind the idea of peak oil. How does the apocalyptic world that Simmons and other energy pessimists foresee in the near future—massive food shortages, a falling standard of living, wars—compare to your own predictions? What does the world look like with less oil?
The Desert Trail runs 656 miles through California. Steve Tabor of Alameda has alphabetized it into 26 weekend hikes, A to Z, starting at the Mexican border in winter. When he isn't walking the barren landscape, Tabor, 58, is a pumper and operator at a vegetable oil refinery in Richmond."I got involved with a group called Desert Survivors, which is a desert protection organization. I became their president and started leading hikes for them. I got involved in the Desert Trail program, which was supposedly going to go from Mexico to Canada. They had no one to do the route work in California and Nevada.
For many years people were trying to figure out how to do this and there were many different concepts. One guy just wanted to carry no food and no water and try to do it. That doesn't work for most people. We wanted to make it like a backpack trip that the majority of hikers would be able to do. I said, 'Why don't we just do it the way we've done it in Desert Survivors? Instead of having these 100-mile-long segments, have quick bites that people could do in two, three or four days. They should be able to carry enough water.'
Wired on air travel, and 32 other modern annoyance:
Ticket Counter: Expensive? If anything, flying doesn't cost enough: The average domestic fare in spring 2007 was $326. That's $50 less than a decade ago, after adjusting for inflation. During the same period, fuel costs nearly tripled. To stay in business, major carriers have aped the strategies of budget operators like Southwest. Largely gone are the free meals, blankets, and pillows. The savings have been passed along as lower ticket prices — at the price of your comfort.
Even as Sprint tentatively rolls out the XOHM network here in the States, the largest Indian telecom company is planning to build a mobile WiMax network covering three states on the subcontinent capable of serving 250 million people. State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is leaning on Soma Networks to build the broadband-speed network in response to government requirement that 20 million broadband lines be in service by 2010. The WiMax rollout will first hit the largest and most-connected states, but BSNL is planning on extending the network if things go well.
Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled's carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.
Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.
At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.
MY husband and I hate haggling. In markets in Istanbul or Jerusalem or Florence, where arguing over price is a high art — and after we have given it our best shot — we always feel we have walked away paying twice as much as the seller expected.And that they are secretly, or not so secretly, laughing at us.
In this country where you are expected to negotiate over cars and houses, we manage quite well, but do not find it fun or exciting. We just want it to be over.
But I have friends who always seem able to strike a great deal in unexpected areas. My friend Lou negotiates a lower price on the oil delivered to his house. On his credit card rates. On hotel rooms. At the gym.
“People are afraid to ask, afraid they’ll be embarrassed or afraid they won’t get the right answer,” he said. “Seventy-five percent of the time, I get the right answer.”
Lou and other successful hagglers are not worried about appearing cheap, as I am, or being turned down, because they start with a different attitude.
Energy demand is expected to grow in coming decades. Jeroen van der Veer, 60, Royal Dutch Shell’s chief executive, recently offered his views on the energy challenge facing the world and the challenge posed by global warming. He spoke of the need for governments to set limits on carbon emissions. He also lifted the veil on Shell’s latest long-term energy scenarios, titled Scramble and Blueprints, which he will make public next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Following are excerpts from the interview:Q. What are the main findings of Shell’s two scenarios?
A. Scramble is where key actors, like governments, make it their primary focus to do a good job for their own country. So they look after their self-interest and try to optimize within their own boundaries what they try to do. Blueprints is basically all the international initiatives, like Kyoto, like Bali, or like a future Copenhagen. They start very slowly but before not too long they become relatively successful. This is a model of international cooperation.
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This photo was snapped at an early morning swim meet this weekend.
SOMETIMES it seems as if Pinot Noir isn't so much a beverage as an exclusive private club. Scan the pages of wine magazines and you'll find glowing reviews on a bewildering array of Pinots from unfamiliar wineries, each with tiny, hundred-case productions, lovingly extracted from tiny, single vineyards, even from tiny blocks of tiny, single vineyards.Friends have a fabulous new Oregon vineyard: www.leftcoastcellars.com. Check out their Pinot selection.Every so often, you might find one of these wines at a wine shop, but chances are if you're reading about it today, it was sold out last week. You might discover a bottle on a chichi restaurant wine list, and you'll shell out quite a few chis for the privilege of tasting it. Or you may get hold of a bottle by adding your name to the waiting list of a winery's buying club -- which might have an opening in 2012.
It starts to feel a bit like unrequited love. What is the Pinot lover to do when the object of affection is so exclusionary, unobtainable? What if, instead of trophy worship, you wanted to make Pinot your house wine, the wine to pour each evening at dinner -- without taking out any sub-prime loans? Where are the Pinots for the rest of us?
In fact there are plenty made in volumes that resemble rivers and not trickles, and with price tags that are pretty populist. And while these may not be the most au courant bottlings in the market, they can be very, very good. Some are being made by winemakers who have taken on the challenge of affordable Pinot with the zeal of evangelists.
All you need to know about Green Bay is that Lambeau Field is on Lombardi Avenue.Even the numerals in the Packers’ address, 1265 Lombardi Avenue, are significant — 12 for the franchise’s record number of N.F.L. championships, 6 when Curly Lambeau was the coach, 5 when Vince Lombardi was the coach. The 1996 team won the other title in Super Bowl XXXI with Mike Holmgren as the coach (he later defected to Seattle) and Brett Favre at quarterback (he is still the face of the franchise). But Lambeau and Lombardi remain its cornerstones.
Lambeau, a star tailback at Green Bay East High School who left Notre Dame after a year, organized the original Packers team at a meeting in the dingy Press-Gazette newspaper offices in 1919 when a local meatpacking company put up $500 for uniforms and pro football was a small-town sport.
Lombardi, a New Yorker originally out of Sheepshead Bay, St. Francis Prep and Fordham before coaching at St. Cecilia’s in Englewood, N.J., at Army under Red Blaik and the Giants’ offense for five seasons (including the 1956 championship team), gilded Green Bay with a major league mystique.
Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) declared independence Friday from federal identification rules and called on governors of 17 other states to join him in forcing a showdown with the federal government which says it will not accept the driver's licenses of rebel states' citizens starting May 11.Both of our Senators: Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported REAL ID.
If that showdown comes to pass, a resident of a non-complying state could not use a driver's license to enter a federal courthouse or a Social Security Administration building nor could he board a plane without undergoing a pat-down search, possibly creating massive backlogs at the nation's airports and almost certainly leading to a flurry of federal lawsuits.States have until May 11 to request extensions to the Real ID rules that were released last Friday. They requires states to make all current identification holders under the age of 50 to apply again with certified birth and marriage certificates. The rules also standardize license formats, require states to interlink their DMV databases and require DMV employee to undergo background checks.
Extensions push back the 2008 deadline for compliance as far as out 2014 if states apply and promise to start work on making the necessary changes, which will cost cash-strapped states billions with only a pittance in federal funding to offset the costs.
Phil Corzine is not abandoning Illinois. A longtime soybean farmer in Assumption, a small town east of Springfield, he is firmly loyal to his state - he once ran the Illinois Soybean Checkoff Board, a program in which Illinois farmers promote Illinois soybeans. But the 1,300 acres Corzine planted in 2007 are not in Illinois, or even in the Midwest. They're in central Brazil, in the state of Tocantins, part of a big swath of soy-producing lands that stretch between the Andes and the Atlantic forest and from northern Argentina to the southern flanks of the Amazon basin. Soylandia, as this immense region might be called, is almost entirely unknown to Americans. But it may well be the future of one of the world's most important industries: grain agriculture.Mainly out of curiosity, Corzine visited Brazil in 1998. Like most U.S. soy producers, he'd noted Brazil's rapid rise in the trade - from amateur to global power in the space of a couple of decades. Its scale of operations, however, stunned him. A big farm in Illinois may cover 3,000 acres; spreads in Soylandia are routinely ten times bigger. Conditions there were primitive, Corzine thought, but Soylandia was going to expand in a way that was no longer possible in the U.S. With three partners he raised $1.3 million from more than 90 investors, mostly Midwestern farmers. In Illinois, he says, that kind of money "can't even buy the equipment, let alone the land." In Brazil it was enough for Corzine's group to acquire 3,500 acres in 2004. Since then, the land has almost doubled in value as other American investors clamored to get into Brazilian soy. This year Corzine, now 49, raised another $400,000. "We feel like what's going on is long-term positive," he says with Midwestern understatement.
Stuck at LAX for a few hours on a layover and hankering for one of the best burgers in all of California? Well, you're in luck.In-n-out is, in some ways, the Culvers of California.There's an In-N-Out Burger just around the corner from the airport, and Gadling knows a little trick to get you there for free.
An In-N-Out is located on nearby Sepulveda Boulevard right next to the Parking Spot--a parking structure that conveniently provides free shuttle service. All you have to do is wait under the red "Hotel and Courtesy Shuttle" sign outside of any airport terminal, and when the yellow and black polka-dotted Parking Spot shuttle swings by, jump on board. It will take you literally next door to In-N-Out. Follow your nose through the back door, across the parking lot, and right inside where you need to order a double-double and fries to enjoy the best layover of your life.
There are a few things to be very careful about, however.
The NY Times today has an excellent article that starts: Ben Bernanke, meet Gary Crittenden. While you're easing credit, he is tightening it." In two brief sentences the writer (Floyd Norris) speaks volumes: Gary Crittenden is Citigroup's CFO, who just told analysts the largest bank in the US is reducing consumer lending and raising interest rates. Asked whether credit card lending was an area where Citi might want to “pull back or increase pricing,” he responded, “All of the above.” Mortgage lending is also being cut.That's what a credit crunch looks like, in the ground: lenders working to repair damaged balance sheets end up throwing monkey wrenches into the Fed's "printing press". And that's also how economies slide to the bottom of a liquidity trap, staring in frustration at a useless ZIRP .
First off, I’m not excusing auto dealers. Or lenders.From the LA Times article:They have a moral and business responsibility to try to stop their customers from doing something stupid, such as buying a vehicle with a sticker price that will stick them with an oppressive debt.
But customers have responsibilities, too. It is their purchase, their money and their car payments. It is up to them, more than anyone else, to know their financial limitations and not cross them.
Yet, so many consumers today buy too much vehicle. Then, when the financial squeeze becomes eye-popping, they look for someone to blame. The dealership and lender make nice targets. Seldom do the debt-ridden blame themselves.
I pondered that while reading a Los Angeles Times article headlined, “New Cars That Are Fully Loaded – With Debt.”
The story tells how some Americans of average means roll over an existing loan on an expensive vehicle in order to get another expensive vehicle. They end up with two loans in one, when they couldn’t afford one.
Americans haven't just been taking out risky mortgages for homes in the last few years; they've also been signing larger automobile loans for significantly longer terms than they used to.As a result, people are slipping into a perpetual cycle of automobile debt that experts think could lead to a new credit crunch extending from dealerships to driveways and all the way to Wall Street.
In early January accident, a California computer technician turned his rental car onto some train tracks in New York per the directions of his sat nav system. The car became stuck and he had to abandon it before an oncoming train hit it. There were no injuries, but there were significant delays in travel. "The rental car driver was issued a summons and is being held liable for the damage to the train and track."That leads a real live lawyer, Eric J. Sinrod, writing at c|net to examine the potential of a driver to point to the GPS manufacturer as being at fault. The article points out:
It was the day before New Year’s Eve, and New Yorkers were leaving the city in droves. Not to escape Times Square celebrations, but to watch the N.F.L. championship game.Roughly 45 years ago, on Dec. 30, 1962, the Yankee Stadium championship rematch between the Giants and the Green Bay Packers was blacked out on local television sets. Enterprising fans fled to southern New Jersey, searching for the broadcast from Philadelphia, or to the north to receive the signal from Hartford.
Those who succeeded watched a pivotal piece of American sports history. The N.F.L. might have first grabbed the public’s attention in the late 1950s, but it needed celebrity, personality and recurring characters for its Sunday gridiron theater.
The 1961 and 1962 N.F.L. championship games, each ending with a Green Bay victory over the Giants, had it all. Born on those afternoons was pro football’s first televised dynasty with Vince Lombardi as king, Paul Hornung as prince and Bart Starr as trusted knight. And although the Giants were twice defeated, by 37-0 in 1961 and by 16-7 the next year, they were the franchise that brought an eminence to the clashes. The Giants were established N.F.L. royalty, having played for the championship three times in the previous five years. They would play for it again in 1963.
Sears Holdings Corp., the storied retailer that helped civilize the American frontier with its catalog sales and later defined the modern department store, is searching for a new compass.Lands End is based in nearby Dodgeville. The post Sears acquisition of Lands End is a story waiting to be told.The retailer yesterday warned results for its fiscal fourth quarter and year would fall well below its expectations, continuing a sharp slide in sales and profit. Even during the best two months of the year, sales at stores open at least a year fell 3.5% compared with a year ago, the company said. Shares tumbled 5% to a more than two-year low, down $4.79 to $91.38 on the Nasdaq. The stock is off 49% in the past year.
But its record in acquisitions has been dismal. In 2002, it paid $3 billion for mail-order firm Lands' End, a business that has declined since the deal.
I went because: Iran has been on my list for some time, but it never seemed the "right time." I decided to finally just go and see what was happening there for myself.Don't miss: Iman Square, Isfahan. Secret Parties, Tehran. The wonderful people, all over the country. Fabulous fabrics from many counties on the silk road.
Edmund Hillary (left) and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay approach 28,000 feet (8,534 meters) on Mount Everest on May 28, 1953. The next day Hillary would become the first human to stand atop the world's highest mountain, with Tenzing joining him seconds later.
Thousands of big-wave surfing fans straggled onto a small beach north of Half Moon Bay on Saturday morning to watch - or try to watch - the greatest surfers in the world battle the worst that the Pacific Ocean can throw at them.Watching the fabled Maverick's contest from the beach seemed nearly as challenging as riding the waves themselves, as close-in breakers blocked the view of the waves that the competitors were riding about a half-mile offshore.
But the fans, many of them tugging on beers as they scrambled for position before sunrise, didn't care.
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).
Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."
In a year when New England Patriots executives are being hailed as football geniuses for engineering an undefeated season, Ted Thompson, the reclusive general manager of the Green Bay Packers, has achieved something equally remarkable.Before this season, fans were calling for Mr. Thompson's head. While the Packers had won just 12 of their last 32 games, he did not seem to care. No matter how loudly the fans complained, Mr. Thompson, who avoids publicity and rarely explains himself, continued sending away popular veterans and replacing them with untested college players, some of whom weren't highly regarded by other NFL teams.
This year, led by a core of players that helped make Mr. Thompson a pariah, the Packers won 13 games and made the playoffs. What's more, the players he's brought into the league during his career are having an exceptional year -- as the playoffs resume Saturday, nearly 10% of the active players on the remaining eight teams were signed out of college by Mr. Thompson.
Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.
To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.
In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.
An impressive waterfall, particularly in Winter with ice climbers scaling the heights. Clusty search.
The Montmorency Falls, cascading 83 metres down to the river below (30 metres more than Niagara Falls), are situated on a historical site of natural beauty in the Montmorency Falls Park. A cable car runs up to the Manoir Montmorency, where a restaurant, reception rooms and boutiques await the visitor.Satellite View.
Gone are the days of a fearless Indiana Jones battling through the jungle in search of ancient treasures. Today's archaeologists are using high-tech tools - from NASA satellites to Google Earth - to do the hard work for them.If they haven't been destroyed or dismantled, many ancient structures were long ago enveloped by soil, water, sand, volcanic ash, or thick vegetation. Though they might not be obvious to the naked eye, archaeologists are learning how to spot them.
Since the World War I, aerial photography from low-flying aircraft has been widely used. These images can help to pick out relics betrayed by unusual mounds, lines or disjointed landscapes. In other places, buried structures are completely invisible to the naked eye. But they still reveal clues to their whereabouts - just not with visible light.
In June, 2006, Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, went to Washington, D.C., hoping to create a little good will. Google was something of a Washington oddity then. Although it was a multibillion-dollar company, with enormous power, it had no political-action committee, and its Washington office had opened, in 2005, with a staff of one, in suburban Maryland. The visit, which was reported in the Washington Post, was hurried, and, in what was regarded by some as a snub, Brin failed to see some key people, including Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who was then the chairman of the Commerce Committee and someone whose idea of the Internet appeared to belong to the analog era. (He once said that a staff member had sent him “an Internet.”) Brin told me recently, “Because it was the last minute, we didn’t schedule everything we wanted to.” It probably didn’t help that his outfit that day included a dark T-shirt, jeans, and silver mesh sneakers.Fascinating to see Herb Kohl mentioned here. He's not been active on many issues so it is surprising to see him pick Google (perhaps there's something on the other side?)Brin did meet with Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, and they spoke about “network neutrality”—an effort that Google and other companies are making to insure that the telephone and cable companies that provide high-speed access to the Internet don’t favor one Web site over another. Around the time of Brin’s visit, an organization called Hands Off the Internet, financed in part by telecommunications companies, ran full-page newspaper advertisements in which it accused Google of wanting to create a monopoly and block “new innovation”; one ad featured a grim photograph of a Google facility housing a sinister-looking “massive server farm.” Brin recognized it as a warning. “I certainly realized that we had to think about these things, and that people were going to misrepresent us,” he said. “We should be entitled to our representation in government.”
Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston explores in his new book how in recent years, government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected.
IN the summer of 1984, Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in Maine, picked up Roxanne Quimby, a 33-year-old single mother down on her luck, as she hitchhiked to the post office in Dexter, Me. More than a dozen years Ms. Quimby’s senior, the guy locals called “the bee-man” sold honey in pickle jars from the back of his pickup truck. To Ms. Quimby, he seemed to be living an idyllic life in the wilderness (including making his home inside a small turkey coop).A classic American story.She offered to help Mr. Shavitz tend to his beehives. The two became lovers and eventually birthed Burt’s Bees, a niche company famous for beeswax lip balm, lotions, soaps and shampoos, as well as for its homespun packaging and feel-good, eco-friendly marketing. The bearded man whose image is used to peddle the products is modeled after Mr. Shavitz.
Today, the couple’s quirky enterprise is owned by the Clorox Company, a consumer products giant best known for making bleach, which bought it for $913 million in November. Clorox plans to turn Burt’s Bees into a mainstream American brand sold in big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Along the way, Clorox executives say, they plan to learn from unusual business practices at Burt’s Bees — many centered on environmental sustainability. Clorox, the company promises, is going green.
Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line — and then harangued me with orders to save or reformat as you stall and splutter and assert points of ludicrous corporate chauvinism (“Invalid product key”! “Unrecognized database format”!).
And just when I need to be alone with my thoughts and my Mac, you detain me by emphasizing my utter dependence on you, melodramatically “recovering” documents lost in your recreational crashes.
After lo this lifetime of servitude, I intend to break free. I seek a writing program that understands me. Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?) and trinkety icons. Goodbye to glitches, bipolar paragraph breaks and 400 options for making overly colorful charts.
I believe within four years, Midwest Airlines will cease to exist as an independent entity. Northwest Airlines did the math and found it was cheaper to buy a small competitor than to risk the entry of AirTran Airways as a low-cost carrier smack in the middle of its so-called Heartland market area.In this case, Northwest is strategically incapable of being a passive investor with TPG Capital. The experience at Duluth, Minn., may highlight why passivity is already a myth.
Midwest announced new flights to Duluth early in its takeover battle. The service was designed to connect Duluth with the Midwest network. Northwest had a lock on daily service prior to Midwest's three daily round trips. One other airline served Duluth, and it only operated flights on Wednesdays and Saturdays to Las Vegas.
Midwest began the Duluth service on March 4, 2007. The takeover involving Northwest was revealed on Aug. 12. On Oct. 19, Midwest announced it would drop Duluth. The city's business newspaper didn't mince words: "Northwest ownership likely affected Midwest decision to exit Duluth."
The following describes snippets of dialogue that could occur in Northwest's boardroom during the next four years:
Hans Nyberg has compiled a great set of New Year's Eve 2008 Panoramas, including one I shot in Quebec City. Thanks much to Hans for a great site and for rendering my scene.
Quebec City celebrated the beginning of their 400th anniversary celebrations that evening. Learn more, here. 2008 is the 400th anniversary of Champlain's landing in Quebec.
Put down your highlighter and don’t bother checking your lottery tickets, because the State of Texas has announced a $100 million winner. Only it’s actually 30,000 drivers living in ozone goal non-attainment areas, and it will be doled out $3,000 at a time. And if you or your family are constrained by a certain income level, if you drive a vehicle 10 years old or older that’s been registered in the county for over a year and passed an emissions test up to 15 months ago, yet failed one recently, then the state is willing to pay you $3,000 to scrap your vehicle and get something newer. All in the name of clean air.Considering that Texas is notoriously clutch-fisted with money for public projects, particularly when the bank account starts with $100 million, this is big news. Especially if your vehicle’s more than 10 years old and has extremely high mileage – or the kind that brings virtually nothing when you go to trade it in – this is a money-for-nothing proposition that can benefit you tremendously. So, before we go on with today’s column, check out the rules for this program at www.driveacleanmachine.com, and then call 1-800-898-9103 to apply for your voucher.
The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.When the backpack exploded on a clear, crisp afternoon at the Media Lab, handfuls of confetti shot out of the cardboard tubes into the air, then fell slowly to earth. On each streamer of paper was written the name of an Iraqi civilian casualty. I had reported on the war (although not from Baghdad) since 2003 and was aware of persistent controversy over the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead as reported by the U.S. government and by other sources. But it wasn't until the moment of this fake explosion that the scale and horrible suddenness of the slaughter in Baghdad became vivid and tangible to me. Alyssa described her project as an upgrade to traditional journalism. "The upgrade is empathy," she said, with the severe humility that comes when you suspect you are on to something but are still uncertain you aren't being ridiculous in some way.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are attempting again to solve the 36-year-old mystery of a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 hijacking during which the perpetrator parachuted from the aircraft and vanished with $200,000 in stolen cash.Clusty Search: DB Cooper.The FBI is renewing efforts to close the case, centred on Northwest flight 305 from Portland to Seattle on 24 November 1971, which erroneously immortalised the name ‘DB Cooper’ in the files of air piracy.
“We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios,” says the FBI. “And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved. Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely.”
Adam Curry (who lives in England) endorses Ron Paul. Perhaps it is all about the weak dollar vs. pound?
