Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida’s orange groves and beaches. Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn’t seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all - it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend. ‘It’s part of natural variability,’ said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, ‘we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.’ Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880. Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change. […]
The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans. Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008. For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls ‘defense’ in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect. Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam’s Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country. If the Pentagon figure of $1 trillion is somewhat less than all other taxing authorities, keep in mind the FBI, the various intelligence agencies, the VA, the National Institutes of Health (biological warfare) are also spending on war-related activities.
In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell. The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership. The authors-J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth-have concluded that another scientific superpower is unlikely to emerge with the same dominance as its predecessors. They have also discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: ‘Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift. American policymakers have begun to notice the relative decline of American strength in science and engineering. U.S. students currently rank twenty-first in science and twenty-fifth in math, near the bottom of the developed world, and the Obama Administration has launched a program called Educate to Innovate, which is designed to jumpstart improvements. Without being […]
Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name. It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake. When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code. The difference is so large that Costco will not allow you to sign for your debit purchase in its checkout lines. Wal-Mart and Home Depot steer customers to use a PIN, the debit card norm outside the United States. Despite all this, signature debit cards dominate debit use in this country, accounting for 61 percent of all such transactions, even though PIN debit cards are less expensive and less vulnerable to fraud. How this came to be is largely a result of a successful if controversial strategy hatched decades ago by Visa, the dominant payment network for […]
WASHINGTON — We can’t get no job satisfaction. Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work. That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs. The drop in workers’ happiness can be partly blamed on the worst recession since the 1930s, which made it difficult for some people to find challenging and suitable jobs. But worker dissatisfaction has been on the rise for more than two decades. ‘It says something troubling about work in America. It is not about the business cycle or one grumpy generation,’ says Linda Barrington, managing director of human capital at the Conference Board, who helped write the report, which was released Tuesday. Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for a variety of reasons: – Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting. – Incomes have not kept up with inflation. – The soaring cost […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
