Greg In The Desert

There is a poorly thought out argument in a AP article that taxing tobacco is a tax on the poor. A Google search for the author, Calvin Woodward, suggests he would never write a positive article about President Obama.

One of President Barack Obama’s campaign pledges on taxes went up in puffs of smoke Wednesday.
The largest increase in tobacco taxes took effect despite Obama’s promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families earning under $250,000 or individuals under $200,000.
This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.

RIO RANCHO, N.M. (AP) — Intel Corp. said Tuesday that it expects to cut more than 1,000 jobs at its Rio Rancho plant as the company ends production of an older silicon wafer technology. Intel will stop making the 200-millimeter wafers at the plant by the end of August, and affected employees will be offered severance packages or can apply for other jobs within the company, spokesman Jami Grindatto said.

Anyone who works at the Intel Rio Rancho plant knew this was coming. I know a large number of people that have been waiting to for a chance to get out with a severance package. Still, this sucks. One fifth (20%) of the people that work at this plant will be gone wether they like it or not.

The AP article doesn’t mention when Intel expect to have everyone out but this KOB article say they start in August.

A article from the Albuquerque Tribune says:

Larry Waldman, a senior economist with the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, projects the layoffs expected to come in August could cause the loss of another 1,000 jobs in places such as the retail and service sectors. “It’s not going to be just 1,000 jobs when you look at effects on other parts of the economy,” said Waldman, referring to retail and service jobs that might supplement Intel workers. While that may not be the rosiest picture, Waldman said the losses will have only a minor impact on the economies of both the state and Albuquerque metro

Update 5/7/07: From the Trib:

U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici has asked Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to assign staff from her agency’s Dallas office to coordinate job placement programs for the 1,000-plus workers expected to lose their jobs at Intel Corp.’s Rio Rancho plant.

An AP article talks about the rise of the antenna with HD TVs. I’ve set up several HD TVs for people and have been impressed with how well normal rabbit ears work to get a HD signal where it did such a crappy job getting a analog signal.

The article also has a quote from a DirecTV persons stating that their signal is better than anything else even though they compress the signals. I have Dish Network (which does similar things). I’m not complaining about their video quality, it’s very good. Sometimes you can tell that the video quality is different. Compression artifacts in fast movement for example, where you dont normally see that on the over the air signals.

Even if you have cable or satellite, I always recommend getting a over the air antenna to receive local channels. Over the air digital TV is that good.

I would have never imagined creating this sentence. Turtle Mountain Brewery company has had it’s anti-drunk driving talking urinal cakes stolen. If you do a search for “talking Urinal Cakes” you will learn how the Rio Rancho based Turtle Mountain is the first to get them in New Mexico.

I saw the report on channel 4, I will update with a link once they decide to put it up.

Update 2/20/07 10:22PM] Here’s a AP article.

At the Turtle Mountain, the urinal cakes have proved so intriguing that three have been swiped already. “I’m mystified why someone would stick their hand into one of our urinals,” Ortiz said. “But I’m sure we’ll see them on eBay. Hopefully, the seller will advertise it as, `Stolen from Turtle Mountain.’”

If you visit Google News on any regularity you will see that it shows top news articles based on how many sources there are. If there is a 1000 news sources However, like 900 of them are the same exact copy of a Reuters or AP article.

It might useful for Google to show the importance of a new story based on how many news sources are carrying it. But if every news source can just “copy and paste” the same Reuters article then exactly how important is that news story? Me thinks a better algorithm is needed.

Also, it would be more useful if when seeing the listing of the stories it filters all all but the source, Reuters in this case, and says “900 article contained the same text, click here to see them all” or something to that extent. I want to see original reporting, not the copy and paste.