A story both intimate and epic that paints a vivid picture of Midwestern farm life.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.
Owe The IRS? No Problem!
“If you owe the IRS lots of money, forget about it. We’ll take care of it. We’ll get them off your back. You won’t have to pay all of what you owe. So, why should you pay what you really owe when our expert former IRS agents can negotiate a low settlement for you?”
The above is a paraphrase of the many commercials that I’ve been seeing on television lately. The premise is that through no fault of your own, you have failed to pay the taxes that you owe, and the mean and nasty IRS wants its money. There is no reason for you to despair, because there are companies who can help you negotiate a settlement with the government.
Moonrise: Madison Arboretum
University of Wisconsin Arboretum.
Broadband Networks Critical For Regional Viability, Growth
If your municipality isn’t looking at creative ways to develop new strategies that include having a state-of-the-art network infrastructure to support economic growth and development, they will be stagnating your property value and quality of life in your area. This was the message I conveyed in a speech on intelligent business campuses at the RTC last week.
Simply put, the three most important words in real estate (“location, location, location”) have turned into “location, location, connectivity” in urban, suburban and rural America.
Corporate site selection committees have included broadband connectivity as one of the top three criteria they are looking for when researching locations for corporate facilities. If your community does not have a good platform for broadband connectivity, it will simply be passed over in favor for one that does.
As a keynote speaker, I also presented these concepts on Tuesday to an urban symposium at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee.
The critical message is the same whether it is for a 5,000-person village in Virginia, a 50,000-person county in downstate Illinois or a 500,000-person city in Wisconsin: “Economic development equals broadband connectivity and broadband connectivity equals jobs.” Without connectivity, there will be little economic development and little if any new jobs.
The table below represents the layers of critical infrastructure that must be taken into account when reviewing regional opportunities.
Verizon discovers symmetry, offers 20/20 symmetrical FiOS service
Some residents of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey who live inside the boundaries of Verizon’s FiOS network will be the first to be able to take advantage of Verizon’s new 20/20 FiOS service. As the name implies, 20/20 FiOS is a symmetrical 20Mbps connection (same speed in both directions), and it’s one of the first symmetrical services to target the consumer market.
Available today, 20/20 will cost $64.99 per month and will include Verizon’s Internet Security Suite and 1GB of online backup (up to 50GB can be purchased at “competitive rates”).
Susan Retta, the company’s VP of Broadband Solutions, was quick to compare the new plan to cable. “For more than a decade, the Internet has been defined by how quickly you can download content,” Retta said. “Our 20/20 FiOS service changes everything by creating an entirely new category of US broadband where ‘fast’ means fast in both directions.”
We’re a long way from this type of service, unfortunately. AT&T sells us slow copper internet services.
Condemning Themselves to More Mediocrity
Most industries innovate from both ends:
- The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
- The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
- It’s the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.
The mediocre record companies, mediocre A&R guys and the mediocre acts are struggling to stay in place. They’re nervous that it all might fall apart. So they wait. They wait for ‘proof’ that this new idea is going to work, or at least won’t prove fatal. (It’s the impulse to wait that made them mediocre in the first place, of course).
So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.
The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they’re condemning themselves to more mediocrity.
Inside Wal-Mart’s Bid to Slash State Taxes – Our Political Class at Work
Legislative sausage supported by our elected officials only makes these “loopholes” worse. Here’s an example that both Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported – a 5.25% offshore earnings tax rate for major corporations. More here. Another example of special interest legislation.
Russia’s Space City Frozen in Time
Rockets still pierce the heavens in a halo of smoke during launches, and engineers and military men still crack open bottles of vodka to celebrate a successful launch. What has changed are the passengers. Nowadays Baikonur embraces the world, from wealthy space tourists to the world’s first Malaysian cosmonaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who blasted off for the international space station on Oct. 10.
The city itself is a rusting relic of the golden age of Russian rocketry, yet if anything, its place in the space industry is heading toward expansion. For at least four years after the space shuttle program ends in 2010, the U.S. will completely depend on Russia – and Baikonur – to send its crews to the international space station.
Facilities and equipment are workable but old. Remnants of demolished buildings and pieces of rusty metal dot the landscape along the roads to the launchpads. Dozens of apartment blocks that were abandoned after the 1991 Soviet collapse stand in rows like tombstones, their windows bricked up.
Internet Freedom? Comcast Blocks the Bible
To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.
An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.
We picked the Bible for the test because it’s not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.
In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.
Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.
Much more at the EFF.
Big Questions: “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?”
This is the first in a series of conversations about the “Big Questions” the John Templeton Foundation is conducting among leading scientists and scholars.
Yes.