News of the real
November, 2005
Ripoff news
Printers return relatively low profit margins. But the ink, ounce for ounce, is four times the cost of Krug Clos du Mesnil Champagne, which sells for around $425 a bottle. Ink is about the same price as Joy perfume, considered to be one of the more pricey fragrances, at $158 for a 2.5-ounce bottle.
After all, when this liquid gold is costing you $65 an ounce, you’ll want to use every last drop.
NYT
The fate of the dead
Every hour and every moment thousands of people leave their life on this earth, and their souls come before the Lord--and so many of them part with the earth in isolation, unknown to anyone, in sadness and sorrow that no one will mourn for them, or even know whether they had lived or not.
Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The dominant way of organizing life is corporatization
A number of companies...have, over the past few years, transformed the American home into a corporate product - probably the last item in our $11 trillion economy that has yet to be marketed and branded on a national scale to consumers.
At the moment, one in four new homes in the United States is built by a large publicly traded home builder, but this ratio will probably change significantly. Several Wall Street analysts and most of the big home builders seem confident that their companies will be responsible for half of all new homes in the United States within 10 years and perhaps more (as the industry consolidates).
In recent years, the difficulty of getting things built has made business harder for small, local builders and easier for big companies, with their greater resources, to gain control of the housing market. “The large builders have taken the position: we’re just going to fight,” Chris Mayer, a housing economist at Columbia University’s business school, says. “ ‘We have lawyers, we have experts, we have money, we’re going to buy these tracts of land and fight it out’ “ - that, according to Mayer, is their position.
Chasing Ground, By Jon Gertner, NYT, Oct 16, 2005’
The mystery of the people’s apathy to goverment corruption
Straining to meet President Bush’s mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.
“We are wasting money hand over fist because we did not deploy the right policy tools,” said Bruce Katz, a vice president at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research group in Washington. “We could have thousands, if not tens of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right now. And we would not have to turn to these costly measures, like hotels, motels and cruise ships.”
October 13, 2005, The New York Times, By Eric Lipton
Corporations can be reigned in
The City Council of New York City overrode another mayoral veto, passing a law that requires larger groceries and stores with food departments to provide a set level of health care benefits to their workers. It has been called an anti-Wal-Mart measure, based on criticism that Wal-Mart’s employee health benefits are inadequate. Bloomberg administration officials said the Council overstepped its authority because federal law prohibits municipalities from regulating the terms of employee health care plans.
October 12, 2005. By Winnie Hu, NYT.
The United States is an empire
[There have been] two hurricanes, which dramatized to everybody in the United States that we don’t have a government. And to the extent we do have one it is not only corrupt but a menace to other countries, to our liberties, to our Bill of Rights. There have been things unimaginable to me and most Americans--that we would have a government that is absolutely in your face to every country on earth. We have insulted everybody.
The principal bit of wisdom that I had to purvey, which I got from Thomas Jefferson and he got from Montesquieu, is that you cannot maintain a republic and empire simultaneously.
Gore Vidal, The Nation, Oct 20, 2005
Scientists and engineers are in service to the war machine
In a Grueling Desert Race, a Winner, but Not a Driver
Stanley, a robotic vehicle designed by a Stanford University team, appeared to earn its creators a $2 million prize on Saturday by being the fastest finisher on a 132-mile course through the Nevada desert.
The race, called the Grand Challenge, was a Pentagon project meant to promote the development of technologies for 21st-century automated warfare.
The Stanford scientists who led the 18-month effort to build Stanley said they saw their victory as a significant leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence, a discipline that has long suffered from big promises that did not pan out.
The three finishers were the survivors from a starting group of 23 teams fielded by alliances of computer, automotive and aerospace firms, university researchers and others.
The competition was organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, and was intended to tap into the talents of researchers and innovators who might not otherwise be found by the nation’s military technology firms. Darpa gave birth to the Internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, along with the Predator drone and the stealth fighter.
The New York Times, October 9, 2005, By John Markoff