Random links
- The 57,000 Page Tax Return
- "GE’s tax bill illustrates both why our corporate tax rate is too high and too low. The nominal rate is too high which encourages a real rate which is too low. Consider the resources that GE spends to lowers its tax bill, not just the many millions spent on clever accounting and accountants and the many millions spent on lobbying but also the many inefficient ways that GE structures its businesses"
- Marketers adapt menus to eat-what-I-want-when-I-want trend
- "Eating weird is the new normal" (Shawn LaPean, executive director of Cal Dining at the University of California- Berkeley). I approve.
- Thirsty Power Plants Threaten Watersheds, Study Finds
- "Texas may offer a preview of what happens in a warming world. In 2007, there were blackouts in parts of North Carolina because a drought affected the Catawba River. “The thirst of the region’s power plants became incompatible with what the river had to give,” the report said." I recently read The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and wonder if we'll see a recurrence of that sort of thing. Per the original article, power plants account for >40% of freshwater consumption, albeit much of this is recycled and returned to the source. (Wouldn't it be more effective just to use evaporative cooling in homes directly instead of the added overhead of power plants doing the same thing less efficiently?)
- Fertility math? Most women flunk, survey finds
- Biological clocks are ticking faster than most expect - "The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages."