Dream fragment. 7:30 am.
It’s the final act of Return of the Jedi. The Emperor laughs an evil laugh and says:
“My fully-operational milkshake will bring all the boys to the yard…where they will be destroyed.“
And then I woke up.
Since the 21 age, your body sluggishly stops makes a important hormone known as Somebody Increment Internal Secretion. The decrease of it, that regulates levels of other hormones in the organic structure is straight answerable for all of the greatest frequent designations of geezerhood, such as crinkles, gray hair, dwindled power, and diminished intimate purpose.
Can anybody reverse-engineer this passage and figure out what language it was originally written in, before it was babelfished?
This article is the first time I’ve heard Cheryl’s Walmart theory repeated by a quoteable authority:
Walmart and Target, depending on your product market, control as much as 50% of the business in the United States (with Walmart expanding to the rest of the world aggressively). A large part of their success is based on being able to ship large amounts of product to stores located in the middle of nowhere at very low shipping prices. If it begins to cost more to ship goods, then it will cost more to sell the goods, and these store’s everyday low price strategy becomes ineffective.
Basically, transportation costs act as the ultimate limit to how big a business can grow. Economies of scale apply as you produce more stuff, but diseconomies of scale apply as you need to distribute more stuff. At some point, you will produce more stuff than you can profitably distribute, after which you can’t grow any more under existing conditions.
But if you could get somebody to subsizide your distribution costs–like, say, the United States armed forces–then there’s no limit to how big you can grow. In other words, the biggest big-box retailers are wholly dependent on current heavily-subsidized energy prices.
In 2006, Japan plans to start taxing carbon:
Under the measure, 2,400 yen [US$23] will be levied per tonne of carbon contained in fossil fuel. For the motorist, that will mean paying an extra 1.5 yen per litre of petrol, or an additional 3,000 yen per household per year.
I like that they’re doing it by carbon weight, rather than specifically as a gasoline tax. If I understand right, it pushes the burden onto heavy industry–which will make infrastructure investments to save itself the cash–instead of onto ordinary citizens, who can’t do that.
From a Guardian report on the strange and terrible career of Lt. Col. Jim Channon–Vietnam veteran, devout New Age Californian, and the man credited with the concept of torturing prisoners with loud music:
I tracked down a former Special Forces psychic spy to Hawaii. Glenn Wheaton, retired sergeant first class, was a big man with a tight crop of red hair and a Vietnam-vet-style handlebar moustache. He told me how in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers - soldiers with super powers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.
Level two, he said, was intuition - making correct decisions. “Somebody runs up to you and says, ‘There’s a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?’ And you go” - Glenn snapped his fingers - “We go right!”
“What was the level above that?” I asked.
“Invisibility,” said Glenn. “After a while we adapted it to just finding a way of not being seen.”
“What was the level above invisibility?” I asked.
“Uh,” said Glenn. He paused for a moment. “We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat … just by wanting the goat’s heart to stop. He did it at least once.”
“Where did this happen?” I asked.
“Down in Fort Bragg,” he said, “at a place called Goat Lab.”
I just got my first ever royalty check today. Seven hundred bucks dropped out of the sky. Now I know what makes the Mickey Mouse copyright lobby so mean–they get free money in the mail. Or else by wire transfer. I assume the meanness, as with most things, scales nonlinearly with the size of the check.
Yeah, that’s right…read ‘em and weep. I think yesterday I said they didn’t have the balls to actually exceed the exit polls’ margin of error with their e-vote counts? Ha.
The excerpts from Osama’s tape last week that I read in the Washington Post didn’t include one of the more interesting sections–the one in which he brags about the cost-effectiveness and economic focus of Al-Qaeda’s tactics and how they intend to continue “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”. Bruce Sterling points out the relevant sections from the Al-Jazeera translation of the speech, and John Robb refers to his earlier discussion of the strategy.
This remarkable article from the Boston Globe points out an often-overlooked feature of the Electoral College. Sure, it’s commonly observed that the process weights elections in favor of small states, by adding two points to everybody’s population-based share. And it’s also commonly defended by that rationale, the same one we use in determining the makeup of the Senate.
But–I’ve never heard this before–there’s a much more sinister aspect to the creaky old thing. Electoral points (calling them “votes” is a bit anachronistic) are awarded based on the total number of potential voters, not the number of votes actually cast. This means, in practice, that the system is in fact weighted not as much in favor of small states, but in favor of populous states with large non-voting populations. In other words–the former Confederacy.
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