Good news for California consumers:
Calif. eliminates city-by-city cable deals – U.S. Business – MSNBC.com
While I have have a very high opinion of my current cable/Internet providor (Cox Communications), a little competition would be a good thing. The wholesale cost for bandwidth on the internet is way down, so you might expect more as an end user. Absent effective competition, the cable company lacks motivation to either raise performance or lower prices.
Avocados are a curious fruit. Aside from tasting good and being good for you, avocados have some odd properties.
- Avocados only ripen after picking.
- Fruit can be stored on the tree for long periods.
- The evolutionary model – why avocados evolved – does not seem to make sense.
The odd bit about history is that what we know thins out remarkably past a few thousand years. Most of the artifacts of civilization do not last very long (when figuring in thousands of years). Given how only a few thousand years erases almost all traces – of a civilization 10,000 or 100,000 years old there may be no surviving trace. Evidence of far older civilizations – say an intelligent offshoot of dinosaurs 100,000,000 years back – may be impossible to find.
Buildings crumble, metal rusts, even surface traces eventually get erased by the wear and churning of the Earth’s crust – but plants reproduce and spread from location to location. If there were a truly ancient civilization it is possible that the only remaining trace would be plants that they bred to produce food. How would you spot such a plant? Look for behavior that makes sense when used to produce food for humans, but not otherwise.
Avocados seem to be just such a plant.
OK, so I do not really think that this proves anything about ancient civilizations (let alone Atlantis). On the other hand, we cannot quite rule out the possibility. Fun to think about. 
Cato-at-liberty » America’s “Help Wanted” Signs
based on:
Visas for Skilled Workers Still Frozen – washingtonpost.com
Oh please, not again. Last I knew the salaries for engineers were pretty flat. If there is a shortage, you would expect salaries to rise. So, I’m guessing the shortage is (another) myth.
They never have trouble getting this stuff published.
Seems like this is a simple sort of connect-the-dots story.
California farmers plow spinach fields under – U.S. Business – MSNBC.com
Most of the agro-workers in California are illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants working in the fields do not get any sort of health care.
E.Coli is a bacteria common in every human stomach. There are lots of different strains of E.Coli – so what lives in one person’s stomach without harm might make another guy very sick.
So we get a very sick Mexican (most likely) taking a dump (a symptom of this strain) in a spinach field. The harvested spinach all goes into one batch washed together – contaminating the entire batch. The bagged spinach is eaten by a large number of folk – some who die from the unfamiliar E.Coli strain.
Maybe we do care about the health of farm workers.
Got my son a pre-paid T-Mobile “To Go” phone. For the first several months he did a good job, and only burned through about 200 minutes a month.
Lately it seemed like his minutes were dropping a bit fast, so we started paying closer attention. Odd since I have not noticed a change in his usage. Seems that in a week his minutes dropped by over 120 minutes with only 20 calls showing in the phone’s log. Since my son generally seems to make fairly short calls, the ~6 minutes average per call sounds wrong. Poked around on the T-Mobile site, and there seems no way to tell how the minutes are used. Surely they have the data, why is it not accessible online?
Seems like on the last two days, the minutes dropped by ~30 each day. Seems rather high … but there is no way to check how the minutes were consumed. Sent an inquiry into T-Mobile. No response, as yet.
Update: No response to email at all after three weeks. This stinks. Called their customer number after watching his account drop by ~500 minutes in two weeks(!). Guess what? They cannot (or perhaps more likely will not) let you see a list of charges against your “To Go” phone. Right. So if there are bogus charges appearing on your account, you have no way of knowing.
Has my son really started burning ~33 minutes on his phone every single day? If so, I have not seen it.
At this point I simply do not trust the T-Mobile company or “To Go” service. After the minutes run out, we will look for another provider (not T-Mobile!).
Left California for my nephew’s wedding in Milwaukee. I-15 through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. I-70 across Utah into Colorado. I-76 up to Nebraska. I-80 across Iowa into Illinois, then shorter segments into Wisconsin. Coming back will jog south to Flagstaff, crossing a bit of New Mexico. Final score – ten states in eight days.
Crusing through Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska is very nice. Iowa a bit less so – though they have (badly configured) free wireless at rest stops. Illinois and Wisconsin were not so nice (more traffic, not very nice rest stops). California is not nice. Nevada is a bit better. Next trip – stay in the middle (east of California and west of Iowa), and head more north.
