According to the May 5, 2008, F.D.R. wrote to King Ibn Saud in 1943 asking for help in bringing peace to Palestine.  The King responded that he “was prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew.”

I’m thinking that it is time to move to a wireless data network such as AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. My only experience with these services was from a couple of years ago, using Verizon. I didn’t like it because (a) it was very slow to connect after a laptop was opened, (b) the coverage was spotty, and (c) it was bursty. I’m wondering if things have improved now. This magazine test claims that the AT&T network is the fastest, but they bitch-slap you if you transfer more than 5 GB per month. It would seem that this limit precludes use by photographers and audio/video lovers. One batch of RAW files from a digital SLR could eat up most of that 5 GB. Listening to streaming audio in the background 24×7 works out to something like 40 GB per month (at 128 Kbits/second).

What are you all using and how do you like it?

[Side note: It continues to amaze me that we Americans think that we can develop economically without a comprehensive and very capable wireless Internet (free for short message; charged for video streaming and the like).]

Aside from simply sending checks to farmers, the bill will drive up food prices, so $10 billion is added to the food stamp program.

One wonders if our politicians have failed to notice that we are no longer a rich country…

It occurred to me that it would be nice to get into a time machine and go back to a meeting of the Royal Society in London circa 1800. This would be my presentation:

Gentlemen: What I propose is that we humans breed ourselves up to a population of 6.7 billion from our current 1 billion. Next we will cut down all of the forests either to grow crops or to provide cooking fuel. We are going to dig and drill down into the Earth to bring up the remains of all previous vegetation and animal life, now in the form of coal and oil. We’re going to burn all of it and release the combustion products into the atmosphere. I do not expect this to have any effect on global climate.

I wonder how it would have been received by the scientific worthies of the day.

The latest chapter in the migration of jobs to wherever labor is cheapest?  Embraer is coming up from the rural outskirts of Sao Paolo to build a factory in Florida.  Details at aero-news.net.

QED

“The Beijing terminal cost $3.65 billion to build, which in China bought a structure bigger than all five terminals at Heathrow put together, for less than half the cost of the new Terminal 5. The project was conceived, designed, constructed, and opened in four years, whereas the Heathrow terminal, from conception to completion, took twenty years. … the public hearings over the Heathrow terminal took the same amount of time as the entire construction of the Beijing one.”

Thanks to the miracle of inflation, I think it is possible that a share of Yahoo will be worth $37 one day. And when you sell that share, you can buy yourself a 40 oz. Diet Coke (the obesity epidemic will render 20 oz. soda bottles obsolete).