The first step to legalize marijuana in California is on a roll. Lawmakers on Tuesday approved Assembly Bill 390 — legislation to tax and regulate marijuana. The Assembly’s Public Safety Committee voted 4-3 on bill at a hearing in Sacramento. The bill will now be passed to the full Assembly on Friday for consideration. The bill, authored by San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, would essentially treat pot the same way alcohol is treated under the law and would allow adults over 21 to possess, smoke and grow marijuana. The law would also call for a fee of $50 per ounce sold and would help fund drug eradication and awareness programs. It could help pull California out of debt, supporters say, raising up to $990 million from the fees. Among the supporters of legalizing marijuana is a group of police, judges and prosecutors who formed a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The organization firmly believes that legalizing marijuana for adults will help improve American society by restricting youth access to it and taking the attraction away from cartels that traffic pot as an illegal substance. ‘The mere fact that there will be votes in […]
Forgot that file on your work computer again? Leave an Excel spreadsheet you need for a presentation on your home laptop? Google on Tuesday introduced a service that will let you upload any type of file to Google Docs and access it from the cloud. Google Apps users will soon be able to upload any file up to 250MB. The service will provide up to 1GB of free storage, with any additional files costing $0.25 per GB per year. Google will start rolling out the service in the coming weeks. ‘Now accessing your work files doesn’t require a connection to your internal office network,’ Anil Sabharwal with the Google Docs team, wrote in a blog post. ‘Nor do you need to e-mail files to yourself, carry around a thumbdrive, or use a company network drive – you can access your files using Google Docs from any web-enabled computer.’ Combined with the shared folders option on Google Docs, users can upload files and give permission for friends or co-workers to edit those documents. ‘For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them […]
Determining whether or not hot water can freeze faster than cold water may seem like a no-brainer. After all, water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. And wouldn’t water hot enough to kill E. coli bacteria (about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius) take a longer path than cooler water at a fall New England beach (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius) towards a frigid future as ice? While a logical assumption, it turns out that hot water can freeze before cooler water under certain conditions. This apparent quirk of nature is the ‘Mpemba effect,’ named after the Tanzanian high school student, Erasto Mpemba, who first observed it in 1963. The Mpemba effect occurs when two bodies of water with different temperatures are exposed to the same subzero surroundings and the hotter water freezes first. Mpemba’s observations confirmed the hunches of some of history’s most revered thinkers, such as Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, who also thought that hot water froze faster than cold water. Evaporation is the strongest candidate to explain the Mpemba effect. As hot water placed in an open container begins to cool, the overall mass decreases as some of the water […]
China supplanted the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market after its 2009 vehicle sales jumped 46 percent, ending more than a century of American dominance that started with the Model T Ford. The nation’s sales of passenger cars, buses and trucks rose to 13.6 million, the fastest pace in at least 10 years, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. In the U.S., sales slumped 21 percent to 10.4 million, the fewest since 1982, according to Autodata Corp. China’s vehicle sales have surged since 1999 as economic growth averaging more than 9 percent a year has helped automakers including General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG compensate for slumping demand in the U.S. and Europe. The market will likely remain the world’s largest, even as sales slow this year on a reduction in tax cuts, according to Booz & Co. ‘China is becoming the center stage of development for the 21st century global auto industry, said Bill Russo, a Beijing- based senior adviser at Booz & Co., which advises automakers. ‘Economic growth has directly translated into growth in automobile sales. December sales of passenger cars, trucks and buses rose 92 percent to 1.4 million. For […]
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters. Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism. The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy — just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens. Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor ‘harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive’. We are not far from a de facto moratorium […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
