By Donal on Thu, 07/21/2011 - 11:30am | Social Justice
The Consumerist blog led me to Down But Not Out Letters, a selection of fifty letters from the six thousand sent in by unemployed persons to describe their situations. I've quoted paragraphs from a few of them below:
"So reads a headline from this morning's Washington Times, and while it does me no good within the 'vast right-wing conspiracy', I am inclined to agree with them, though the Devil as they say, is in the details. What Larry Korb, John Podesta and Barney Frank all have in common (besides presenting a pretty reliable bellwether of what NOT to do on most things) is that they approach DoD as if it were an ATM, sitting there chock full or money just waiting to subsidize the rest of the economy. Their collective desires to denude DoD of nearly $1 trillion spring not from a sense of what is best
Everyone is entitled to opinions. But facts are facts. And [Arthur Brisbane] the public editor’s column about our June 26 story on shale gas economics gets many of them wrong. As a result, the column’s conclusions are, quite simply, misguided and unsupported.
The town of Quartzsite, AZ, population 3,466, is in disarray after a video showing police hauling away a citizen for speaking at the town meeting podium went viral. The woman was saying that the town council had been violating open meeting laws.
Getting financing is still a challenge for apartment developers today — Douglas came through again for Epstein's latest project — but apartments are now the favored class of commercial real estate among buyers and builders. If you see a building under construction, it's most likely an apartment complex.
The tepid economy and cratered housing market have been good for apartment landlords, analysts say, and the slow pace of recovery is expected to help keep apartments the most desirable abode for many in the years ahead.
Audi will equip all of its locally-made models with mild hybrid technology next year according to an interview with Mr. Dominique Boesch, the GM of FAW-VW’s Audi sales unit, making it the first automaker in China to do so.
We're seeing the most visible opposition to raising the debt ceiling from Republicans and the Tea Party. Some few old-style conservatives may actually believe in fiscal responsibility, but movement conservatives - who have reflexively voted for increases under previous administrations - are now exploiting the issue to appease the Tea Party and to obstruct Obama.
For very different reasons, many voices in the Energy Depletion community are also very much against raising the debt limit. Briefly, they feel that increased spending can only be supported by continued growth, and that continued growth can't be supported now that we are past the peak of oil, and probably closer to the peak of natural gas and coal than most people realize.
I am in favor of a better, more extensive rail system, but I wonder if high-speed rail is cost effective and what we really need. As if to read my mind, The Infrastructurist features a four part series, For and Against High-Speed Rail, each with a con and pro position.
Using computer models developed by Argonne National Laboratory, the [Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU)] researchers's goal was to find the optimal level of vehicle electrification that provided the most environmental benefit for the least dollars spent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They found that the smaller the battery pack, the greater the benefit when comparing the cost of vehicle acquisition and the amount and type of energy used to power it.
Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance. Lawrence Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, is a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist, skipping lightly over the personal adventures that have been emphasized in earlier biographies. Krauss succeeds in explaining in nontechnical language the essential core of Feynman’s thinking. Unlike any previous biographer, he takes the reader inside Feynman’s head and reconstructs the picture of nature as Feynman saw it.
Rules proposed recently by New York State for regulating a controversial form of natural gas drilling are drawing expressions of guarded optimism from the natural gas industry but objections from some environmentalists, who say they do not go far enough in protecting water supplies.
