7.2 million families holding sub-prime mortgages, disproportionately lower-income, black and Latino are in danger of losing their little bit of the American Dream.
37 million poor people (the definition of poverty for a family of 4 is an income of less than $20,000) can receive $600 a person and $300 per child if they have an income already. If not, then not.
In a society without justice such as ours, poor people, people with one foot out of poverty, and the working class are experiencing a crisis only guessed at on Wall Street where all the mischief began.
the research shows women, of all ages with no children, on average do 10 hours of housework a week before marriage and 17 hours of housework a week after marriage. Men of all ages with no children, on the other hand, do eight hours before marriage and seven hours afterwards.
Since arriving at Stanford as a professor in 1995, Ms. Koller has led a group of researchers who have reinvented the discipline of artificial intelligence.
Tara Smith at Aetiology wrote about some fantastic inventions that can really improve the lives of millions (billions?) of poor people around the world. As she puts it, this is “intelligent design the world really needs.”
Cheap irrigation devices, water filters, and energy solutions are detailed at Design for the Other 90%. These devices are typically quite simple, but ingenious and cheap.
The Pot-in-Pot system consists of two pots, a smaller earthenware pot nestled within another pot, with the space in between filled with sand and water. When that water evaporates, it pulls heat from the interior of the smaller pot, in which vegetables and fruits can be kept. In rural Nigeria, many farmers lack transportation, water, and electricity, but one of their biggest problems is the inability to preserve their crops. With the Pot-in-Pot, tomatoes last for twenty-one days, rather than two or three days without this technology. Fresher produce can be sold at the market, generating more income for the farmers.
Originally uploaded by boubou1 LMB recently wrote about farm subsidies in the US and the damage they do. They affect the major ingredients and prices of the food we buy.
there are five crops which receive huge, huge payouts from the US government: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton. None of these five are all that nutritious (particularly the cotton), while healthier produce like broccoli and carrots and such get almost no subsidies.
The result? According to Pollan, “real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) [he means corn syrup] declined by 23 percent.” Calories are cheap and nutrients are ’spensive.
Since high fructose corn syrup is actually quite bad for you, it seems that one effect of subsidizing corn so heavily is to make Americans unhealthy. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to put that subsidy money into other crops and healthcare?
But the most devastating result of these subsidies is felt in other countries.
The second catastrophe that these food subsidies is the destruction of foreign agriculture. If you get a jillion dollars in free government money for growing soybeans, you can sell them for much cheaper than the amount it cost to produce those soybeans. And if those subsidies encourage you to grow more soybeans than you can sell domestically (and they do), then you’ve got extra to sell abroad. And if your exported soybeans are competing with local farmers who do not get a jillion dollars in free government money, then your soybeans will sell over your competitors. Then your competitors go bankrupt, and whee, global poverty.
I need a new shower curtain. My current curtain came with the apartment. It is a very dark green and is made of a material very like saran wrap. So every morning I struggle in the dark to keep cold air out of my bath without suffocating myself in my exceptionally clingy shower curtain. And just when I think I have it tamed, it leaps from the side of the tub to wrap around my legs.
As I’m drying my hair and wiping off the slime from the shower curtain, I fantasize about a tough plastic curtain, clear, with the little weights at the bottom.
The court said that MA’s law defines rape as intercourse “by force and against [the] will” of the victim and that “fraudulently obtaining consent to sexual intercourse does not constitute rape as defined in our statute.”
